THOUGHTS OF 
THE SPIRITUAL 








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Thoughts of the Spiritual 



BY THE 

REVEREND ARTHUR CHAMBERS 

ASSOCIATE OF KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON 
VICAR OF BROCKENHURST, HANTS 

Author of" Our Life After Death" " Man and the 
Spiritual World" etc. 




PHILADELPHIA 

GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO 

PUBLISHERS 



MAR ii 1905 

tsSS <l AXc, No; 

OOPY 8. 




^^ 



Copyright, 1905, by 

George W. Jacobs & Company 

Published March, jgoj 



PREFACE 

A few words, by way of introduction to the 
American Edition of "Thoughts of the Spiritual," 
will, I think, not be out of place. 

This volume is the outcome of a very large corre- 
spondence with thoughtful and earnest readers of 
my two books — " Our Life After Death " and " Man 
and the Spiritual World," in all parts of the world. 

Their study of the subject with which I had dealt, 
led them to ask many important and pressing ques- 
tions. I have attempted to answer them in this 
new volume. As many of my correspondents are 
on the other side of the Atlantic, it seems to me 
that I shall enhance the chances of my answer reach- 
ing these, by publishing an American edition, as 
well as an English edition, of this work. 

Further, I am anxious that the views I have set 
forth in this volume should be brought within the 
horizon of thought of that great body — our American 
co-religionists. 

Perhaps, the great All-Father will use what I have 
written as a humble means whereby some of the 



6 Preface 

prevailing theological misconceptions as regards 
Himself may be swept away, and some minds may 
be set on the track which will lead them to perceive 
a more glorious God and Gospel than are commonly 
presented. 
That is my earnest hope and prayer. 

Arthur Chambers. 

The Vicarage, 
Brockenhurst, Hampshire, 
England. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I, Doubters of the Spiritual ... 9 
II. Our Touch of the Spiritual by Prayer . 33 

III. Ourselves in Relation to Those Behind 

the Veil ...... 60 

IV. On the Mountain of Spiritual Manifesta- 

tion ....... 88 

V. A Spiritual World and the Spiritual Fac- 
ulties to Discern it . . . .105 

VI. Christ's Impartation of the Higher Spirit- 
Life . . . . . . .129 

VII. Beggar-Spirits . . . . 151 

VIII. Our Hope in God's Judgments . . 1 84 

IX. " Excelsior " 204 

X. The Real Gospel . . . . .225 



^bougbts of tbc Spiritual 



CHAPTER I 

DOUBTERS OF THE SPIRITUAL 

" When they saw Him, they worshiped Him : but seme 
doubted.' 1 '' — Matt. 28: 17. 

Some doubted ! 

This candid admission of the Evangelist is calcu- 
lated to startle and set one thinking — is it not ? 

Eleven men stood face to face with the Risen Sa- 
viour as He manifested Himself from the plane of 
spirit-life; they recognized Him, they heard Him 
speak, and spoke to Him, and yet some of them 
doubted. 

Within a circle of perfectly sincere ones who 
were earnest seekers after truth, and who had had 
an experience that was common and identical in re- 
gard to something that had lately happened, under 
circumstances excluding all possibility of imposture 
or delusion, were some who were absolutely con- 
vinced that they were confronted with a great real- 
ity; whilst others doubted. 



io Thoughts of the Spiritual 

It shows how differently constituted are human 
minds; how hard it is for some to grasp the facts of 
spiritual existence; how difficult — how exceedingly 
difficult — to break away from preconceived notions, 
and to so mentally adjust themselves as to be able to 
receive new light on the mystery of human life and 
destiny. Jesus, in the enhanced power of risen 
life, stood before eleven Apostles: but some doubted. 

We shall the better estimate the significance of 
St. Matthew's statement, perhaps, if we try to pic- 
ture the incident to which he refers. 

About three weeks have passed away since that 
day on which the religious world of Jerusalem had 
been startled and disturbed by the rumor that a 
crucified Man had been seen alive after death. 

The eleven companions and friends of the Christ 
have left their hiding-place — that upper room in one 
of the least important quarters of the sacred city — 
and have very quietly and unobservedly made their 
way northward to Galilee. The risen Jesus has 
bidden them meet Him again there, on a certain 
mountain — a quiet out-of-the-way spot. There, 
they will be away from the distraction of city life, 
and outside the circle of minds whose influence is 
inimical to a realization of the Spiritual. 

They have reached Mount Hermon; so ruggedly 



Doubters of the Spiritual 1 1 

grand and majestic, as it towers above the surround- 
ing landscape, capped by its turban of snow. It is 
the place of all others for a manifestation from the 
World of Spirit. Three of the men have been 
there with the Master before His crucifixion. It is 
the scene of the Transfiguration. Often, of late, 
have those three — Peter, James and John, spoken of 
what they saw on that occasion: of that mysterious 
change that came over the physical body of Jesus, 
and of that extraordinary appearance, as living men, 
of departed Moses and Elijah. 

" This is the spot where He said He would meet 
us," says Peter. " Here it was that James and John 
and I saw Him a few weeks ago, just as He ap- 
peared when He met me and talked to me on the 
day He rose from the dead. I wonder whether He 
will come to us now in that form, or as He showed 
Himself to us in that upper room, when Thomas 
and we saw the wound-prints slowly develop them- 
selves on His extended hands and uncovered side. 
Perhaps He will appear stranger-like, as He did to 
our two friends, and also to us on yonder lake- 
shore in the early morning. How strange it seems 
that He can alter the appearance of Himself at will ! 
What a tremendous mystery there is about His be- 
ing since He died on that cross! 



12 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

"What became of that body which we saw — a 
poor, dead and disfigured thing — placed in Joseph's 
tomb ? I am sure I do not know. But there are 
two things I do know. I know this — the Master 
Himself is alive; and that body which He has 
now is not the body He had when He lived and 
went about with us. It is altogether different from 
these bodies of ours. We cannot suddenly come 
into a room whose door is locked and barred. We 
cannot in a moment vanish from sight. We cannot 
present ourselves in a particular form at one time, 
and in another form directly afterward. We can- 
not write our thoughts on our body, as He is able 
to do. You remember what our friends of Emmaus 
told us ? You remember what happened to those 
hands of the Master to convince Thomas ? I tell 
you," continues the earnest Peter, looking expect- 
antly around, " I tell you, it is all very wonderful. 
I sometimes think the Master must have dissolved 
that dead body which we saw laid in Joseph's sep- 
ulchre. We all noticed the way in which those 
grave-clothes were lying. They had not been dis- 
arranged, as they would have been, had the body 
beneath them come to life and stood upright. No, 
they were just as they had been placed. They had 
only collapsed to the ground, as if the underlying 



Doubters of the Spiritual 13 

body had been dissolved. But one thing — at all 
events — is quite certain — whatever may have hap- 
pened to the Master's dead body, the Master Him- 
self is not dead ; and Moses is not dead, and we 
shall not be dead, when we get rid of these flesh- 
and-blood tabernacles of ours." 

" Well, well, I am sure I know not what to 
make of it all," answers one of the others in the 
group. "It is very upsetting in regard to what I 
have been taught to believe. I had always sup- 
posed that death blots us out of existence until a 
future resurrection day, when we shall be called 
into being again. That is what our Rabbis teach. 
But our Master Jesus has upset all my old ideas on 
this subject. According to what one of the women 
said, when He was dying He promised one of the 
men crucified with Him, that he should be with 
Him the same day in Paradise; and, three days after 
we saw Him dead, // seems as if He were still 
alive." "Seems as if He were alive!" half-angrily 
interposes Peter. " What do you mean ? Did you 
not, yourself, see Him twice in that upper room at 
Jerusalem ? You were standing by, on the lake- 
shore, when He asked me three times if I loved 
Him. How can you say it seems as if He were 
alive ? Do you doubt the evidence of your senses ? 



14 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

Think you that you and all of us were dreaming ?" 
" It may be so, friend Peter," rejoins the other. 
" We all may have been dreaming, or rather imag- 
ining. The mind is a very curious thing; it can 
imagine almost anything. Disordered nerves and 
indigestion produce strange fancies. We may have 
been under a strong mental impression only. Our 
overwrought feelings may have led us to suppose 
that we have seen our dear Master since He died, 
while all the time there may have been no more 
than a picture conjured up by our disordered brains. 
I bethink me of what the Psalmist has said about 
the oblivion of death, and of what our learned 
Rabbi said not long ago in the synagogue — ' The 
grave is the bourne from which no traveler returns.' 
That is not true, and David must have been in error, 
if the Master since death has really been seen by us, 
and Peter saw Moses on this mountain, as he says." 
"What does it matter what the Rabbi may have 
said, or what all the ecclesiastics in Jewry may 
say ?" responds the impetuous Peter. "Facts are 
facts; and if they do not agree with men's theories, 
then so much the worse for the theories. Here are 
the facts. Eleven of us — healthy, strong, level- 
headed men, have all seen the Master since He 
died, and that not once, nor twice, but several 



Doubters of the Spiritual 15 

times. We have all heard Him speak, and some of 
us have spoken to Him. Were we all mentally de- 
ranged in such a way as that each of us had precisely 
the same hallucination ? And are the women and 
Mary and our two friends also the victims of this 
hallucination ? Why it appears to me that your ex- 
planation of this fact is far more difficult of belief 
than the fact itself." 

" Listen to me," says Thomas to his companions. 
" Peter is right. You well know I am not a credu- 
lous individual. I showed you what a doubter I 
was. I could not bring myself to believe that the 
Master had really been seen after death. It upset 
all my old ideas of things. But He convinced me of 
that fact when He appeared in that room, and I 
touched Him. Now, I would as soon deny that / 
am alive, as that He is alive." . . . 

A start! A sudden silence! A thrill of mingled 
awe and pleasure! And then a circle of kneeling 
men around a living Christ. He speaks, does that 
risen Spirit-Son of God, as if He were reading every 
difficulty in the minds of those doubting ones — 
" All power has been given to Me in heaven and 
upon earth." 

"And when they saw Him, they worshiped 
Him: but some doubted," as so many Christians are 



1 6 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

doubting now the phenomena — the facts and possi- 
bilities of spiritual existence. 



Now this incident recorded by St. Matthew is 
not without a very suggestive interest to us who 
are living in this twentieth century of advancing 
thought and knowledge. 

I. The world to-day is confronted with facts of 
such a character as to cause millions to recast their 
ideas of themselves and the experience that awaits 
us after death. For the past thirty or forty years, 
the attention of mankind has been specially directed 
to the existence of phenomena for which it is im- 
possible to account on any hypothesis of physical 
causes. 

These phenomena are so persistent, and so extra- 
ordinary, and have been so universally attested, that 
at last the thoughtful minds among us have arrived 
at the conclusion that they are facts that cannot be 
ignored; but must be faced and investigated. Ac- 
cordingly, an immense amount of careful study has 
been bestowed upon the subject, and the important 
truth has been established that these phenomena 
are the outcome of psychic power, and point to 
tremendous possibilities in regard to spirit. The 
testimony that is forthcoming from all quarters of 



Doubters of the Spiritual 17 

the globe in regard to these psychic phenomena 
may be summarized as follows — (a) The human 
spirit is an entity — a personality, that can at times 
function and express itself, even in this earth-life, 
apart from the mediumship of a physical body. 
(b) The same spirit, after leaving the earthly body, 
is possessed of enhanced powers; is capable in a 
variety of ways of communicating with persons 
still remaining on the earth-plane; and can under 
certain conditions manifest itself, even to the ex- 
tent of temporarily materialising for that purpose. 

The evidence in support of these spiritual possi- 
bilities is simply overwhelming, and is continu- 
ally accruing. Ten thousand times more proof of 
present-day appearances of persons after death is 
available than was the proof available that Jesus 
was seen after death. 

The light of scientific research has been turned 
upon the phenomenon of post-mortem appearances, 
and numbers of men renowned in the world of 
science have been convinced that a human being 
survives the incident of physical dissolution, and 
possesses the power at times of manifesting himself 
to those whom he has left behind in earth-life. 

To those who may not have followed the present- 
day trend of science in regard to this matter, we 



18 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

commend the late Professor F. W. H. Myers' work, 
"Human Personality, and its Survival of Bodily 
Death." 

Here, then, we have a striking similarity between 
what took place in the time of St. Matthew, and 
what is taking place to-day. A crucified Master 
was seen after death by His friends, in all the 
mysterious reality of risen and enhanced spiritual 
life and power. In a body which could act inde- 
pendently of the laws that govern the physical, He 
could pass through a closed and barred door, change 
the appearance of His person, and vanish suddenly 
from sight. At other times, as occasion arose, He 
could appear in so materialized a form that His 
body possessed all the characteristics of ordinary 
physical substantiality. 

To-day, we are confronted with psychical phe- 
nomena which answer point by point to those 
appearances of the risen Jesus. 

Numbers of persons who have departed this life 
have been seen afterward in the reality of spirit- 
life and powers. They, too, have come in bodies 
which are not conditioned by the ordinary laws 
of matter. They are able to appear and vanish 
suddenly. They possess the power of entering a 
room under conditions which no physical body 



Doubters of the Spiritual 19 

could overcome. Again, there are times when 
these departed ones can so materialize themselves, 
for the purpose of recognition, as to make them- 
selves bodily the exact counterpart of what they 
were in earth-life. Those who have investigated 
psychic phenomena are familiar with all these pos- 
sibilities of spiritual existence. After making full 
allowance for all fraud and imposture that may 
have been practiced in regard to this matter, as it 
has been practiced in regard to all matters affecting 
man's religious experience, there remains a mass 
of incontrovertible evidence in attestation of the 
facts we have instanced, so great as must bring 
conviction to all who consider and investigate it. 

Here, then, is the first point which we, as wise 
men and women, do well to recognize. We of 
to-day are faced with psychic facts which in char- 
acter are similar to the great fact that startled man- 
kind when Jesus appeared after death. Not all, 
then, saw Him in His risen life; not all believed the 
testimony of those who did see Him. And so it is 
at this present time. Not all see those who are 
permitted to manifest themselves from the spirit- 
world; and not all credit the testimony of those who 
have had that experience; but the facts themselves 
remain, as the fact of the risen Jesus remained — a 



20 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

great factor in the unity of spiritual truth, which 
men must take into account before they can rightly 
estimate that truth itself. 

II. The attitude of mankind toward the incident 
of our Lord's manifestation of Himself after death, 
and the present-day attitude of men and women 
toward psychic phenomena are similar. Christ's 
appearance after death came to the world as an 
absolutely unrealized fact in connection with things 
spiritual. It upset preconceived ideas, and, as an 
unfamiliar and novel phenomenon, it had to bear 
down all the opposition that comes from that tend- 
ency on the part of persons — especially religious 
persons — to settle themselves in traditional beliefs, 
and to imagine that no further light on spiritual 
matters can possibly be forthcoming — at least in 
this world. It is precisely so in regard to the 
psychic phenomena that are happening to-day. 
They upset preconceived ideas. They are unfa- 
miliar and novel to many; and so for this reason 
they ate a priori regarded as false. 

There are two classes of doubters in regard to 
psychical phenomena to whom we wish to refer. 
First, there are those persons who refuse to make 
any inquiry or to receive any information on the 
subject, on the grounds that as the alleged phe- 



Doubters of the Spiritual 21 

nomena cannot possibly be true, all testimony con- 
cerning them must of necessity be either deliberate 
falsehood or the outcome of hallucination. Thou- 
sands of Christians take this line. Apparently un- 
conscious of the illogical position they assume, 
they will assure one that they accept without a 
shadow of doubt all the statements of the Bible as 
to appearances after death and other spiritual phe- 
nomena, and in the next breath will label an ever- 
accumulating mass of testimony in regard to similar 
present-day phenomena as fraud or delusion. 

No doubt, these good people would be terribly 
shocked by the suggestion that had they been 
living when Jesus manifested Himself after death, 
they would, in all probability, no more have be- 
lieved the fact than did the ecclesiastical authorities 
who put Him to death. As far as testimony is con- 
cerned, the fact of the post-mortem appearance of 
the Lord Jesus Christ is not so well nor so uni- 
versally attested as are the spiritual phenomena of 
the present day. The Christian folk who profess 
to believe the one and scout as absurd the other, do 
well to remember this. Let them be consistent. 
If present psychic phenomena are, as they say, no 
more than mental impressions, and have no objective 
reality, then why should we not account for the 



22 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

after-death manifestations of Jesus in the same 
way ? Now, in regard to this particular class — 
those good people who will not believe in spiritual 
phenomena, unless those phenomena have taken 
place thousands of years ago, and are mentioned in 
the Bible — their present chance of obtaining fuller 
knowledge of the spiritual is a very remote one. 
Others will learn great facts: they will not. When 
one persistently refuses to take notice of, and to 
investigate realities that are capable of verification; 
when he rejects as worthless the testimony of 
honest men who have verified those realities, and, 
in the spirit of self-complacent ignorance, pro- 
nounces their testimony incredible, because it does 
not accord with his own experience, then he es- 
tablishes himself in a condition of unenlightenment, 
in which, in all human probability, he will remain. 

Among the great host of earnest truth-seekers 
scaling the heights of extended knowledge, he will 
hold no place. They will go on to know what he 
can never learn in this world. He will be left 
behind. He will have handicapped himself. The 
revealments that will come to him when he shall 
have gone from earth-life, will considerably startle 
and humble him. He might have known so much; 
but, thanks to himself, he will have learned so little. 



Doubters of the Spiritual 23 

Such an one is a doubter; but he must not be 
catalogued with those apostolic men who doubted 
the spiritual fact of the Risen Christ. They, deeply 
conscious of the limitations of human knowledge, 
and anxious for fuller enlightenment on a subject 
of vital importance, adjusted their minds and their 
actions in such a way as to make it possible for 
their doubts to be dissipated. He, on the other 
hand, is so disposing himself that the removal of 
doubt is impossible. It is not in respect to this 
particular class that the statement of St. Matthew 
affords hope and encouragement. The men and 
women who doubt spiritual realities, because they 
have fortified themselves against conviction by the 
immovable idea that psychic phenomena are impos- 
sibilities, and therefore delusions, are certainly not 
the persons who would have gone on the chance 
of enlightenment to that Galilean mountain of 
Manifestation. They must be classed among those 
Jews of old who did not want to know, and did 
not mean to know, the truth about that Easter fact. 
But there is another class of doubters in regard to 
the Spiritual. It stands quite apart from that class 
to which we have just referred. It comprises an 
ever-increasing number of thoughtful men and 
women, who are earnest and conscientious seekers 



24 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

after truth; who feel that the great basal fact of all 
religion — man's possession of a spirit and its con- 
scious survival of physical dissolution — has been 
but vaguely and unsatisfactorily proclaimed in 
much of the teaching of the past; who count it 
likely that, in an age so marked by the advance of 
scientific knowledge, more light on the mystery of 
human being may be forthcoming, and who res- 
olutely set themselves to seek that light. This 
is the class that embraces many who are dis- 
tinguished in the world of science and letters; 
men and women whose estimate of the importance 
of spiritual phenomena in their bearing upon 
thought and life, is to be found in the fact that 
they are members of the Psychical Research 
Society. 

The attitude of these persons toward existing 
psychic phenomena is a right and sensible one. 
Attested facts, however opposite to ordinary 
experience, cannot and must not be placed out- 
side the radius of practical enquiry and classifica- 
tion. Such an enormous mass of testimony and 
direct evidence in respect to spiritual phenomena 
has been gathered from all quarters of the world, 
and this of so persistent and emphatic a character, 
and so closely touching the question of man's 



Doubters of the Spiritual 25 

spiritual being and his powers, that they feel, and 
rightly feel, in spite of the frowns and contempt of 
the other class, that no efforts can be too great to 
get at the truth of a matter so transcendently im- 
portant. 

There are doubters, of course, in this class of 
which we are speaking; but they are wholly 
different from the doubters of the other class. 
Unlike these latter, they may be rightly grouped 
with those earnest, though as yet unconvinced 
ones, who doubted the fact of the Risen Christ. 
They do not close the mind against the inlettings 
of fresh knowledge, because certain facts adduced 
are not coincident with their own experience. 
They are quite prepared to humbly think that 
there maybe "more things in heaven and earth" 
than they had imagined. They are quite ready 
to consider the testimony of others, although it 
attests facts strange and improbable to them, and 
are willing to surrender themselves to those condi- 
tions under which investigation and confirmation 
of the alleged facts are possible. In a word, the 
attitude of these doubters, as was the attitude of 
the doubting Apostles in regard to the Risen Jesus, 
is favorable to the acquirement of extended knowl- 
edge. Like those honest sceptics of old, they go 



26 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

forth with an open and humble mind and a teach- 
able spirit in quest of brighter light. Those un- 
convinced disciples of Jesus went to that moun- 
tain of Galilee with no fixed conviction that their 
Master was a living reality. The supposition did 
not commend itself to them; it upset all precon- 
ceived ideas; judged from the standpoint of their 
then possessed knowledge, it appeared incredible; 
but still it might be true, and it might be possible 
they would see Him there. And so to that moun- 
tain they went to put themselves in the track of en- 
lightenment. 

The honest doubters of to-day resemble those 
men. They, too, have put themselves in the track 
of enlightenment. Not as yet have they reached that 
point of experience at which fixed conviction of the 
reality of a spiritual environment has been inborne 
upon their mind; but they are prepared to admit 
that these realities may be existing in our midst, 
and may be capable of verification. They have 
adjusted themselves to receive the unfoldments of 
the Spiritual. 

It is easy to predict what the result will be in 
regard to them. Their growing knowledge and 
patient study of psychic phenomena will bring 
them to the realization of great and marvelous 



Doubters of the Spiritual 27 

truths; not at once, perhaps, nor at the outset of 
their investigations. The doubting Apostles were 
not brought to the realization of the Living Christ 
by one or even by several post-mortem manifesta- 
tions of Himself. The verities of the Spiritual 
Universe are not easily grasped by human minds 
while functioning under the fettering conditions 
of the Physical. The obscuring influence of in- 
definite teaching, of prejudice and of materialistic 
thought, has to be swept away, before the mind — 
even the Christian mind — can rise to a worthy con- 
ception regarding the facts and possibilities of 
spirit. We have been so schooled to accept the 
teaching of the past as embodying the all that can 
be known about things spiritual, and that teaching 
has been so hazy and ungraspable, that it is not an 
easy matter to import at once into our conscious- 
ness new and definite ideas. The existing psychic 
realities that so often carry conviction to minds 
uninfluenced by traditional notions, are less potent 
to effect that end in the case of those who can only 
think within the groove of prescribed teaching. 
That is why so many religious people are the most 
backward in accepting the facts and results of 
psychical research. "Those facts and the logical 
deductions therefrom cannot possibly be true," 



28 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

say they; "they neither accord with the teach- 
ing we have received, nor with the views we 
hold." 

Quite true; but they do accord in a very striking 
manner with the statements of a Book they profess 
to believe and reverence. Why believe the testi- 
mony of men who lived long ago, and refuse to 
believe the testimony of men, equally as truth- 
loving, who are living now? Well, some of the 
Apostles had their doubts in regard to the Risen 
Saviour; and they were very grave doubts; and 
had they surrendered themselves to that spirit of 
Agnosticism that neither knows nor takes the 
trouble to know, they would never have become 
the pioneers in teaching the world a great spiritual 
truth. But, unlike a number of modern Christians, 
they were men of another mould. The truth must 
be ascertained at any cost to preconceived ideas and 
authorized doctrines. Fresh evidence of a tre- 
mendous reality might, perchance, be forthcoming. 
They must keep themselves within the circle of 
possible knowledge. Women had told them that a 
spiritual being, seen at the sepulchre, had said that 
the Risen Jesus had declared that in Galilee they 
should behold Him. It might be so, in spite of all 
improbability. And so those doubters journeyed 



Doubters of the Spiritual 29 

with the non-doubters to that mountain of Mani- 
festation. But — it may be urged — that renewed 
Manifestation of the Christ on that appointed spot 
did not convince them. It did not; for St. Matthew 
has recorded that "some doubted." That particular 
experience of the Spiritual did not there and then 
dissipate their doubt; but it weakened it, and paved 
the way for its ultimate removal. Subsequent ex- 
periences of the Spiritual brought those doubters to 
an unshakable conviction in regard to a sublime 
fact. Within a few weeks, those same men were 
proclaiming at Jerusalem — the centre of a religious 
conservatism that denied and ridiculed the state- 
ment — the fact of the grandest Manifestation from 
the Spiritual World that ever startled men and set 
them thinking. The significance of this Easter 
incident, in its bearing upon the spiritual expe- 
riences of this twentieth century, is apparent. 

The world was confronted then with a series of 
psychic phenomena which presented themselves to 
mankind as strange and incredible. At that Easter 
time spiritual beings conveyed messages from a 
departed Jesus to persons on this earth; saints 
whose bodies were reposing in the grave were 
seen by many in the city of Jerusalem; and the 
Christ Himself, whom men had beheld crucified 



30 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

and dead, was seen afterwards in all the potency 
and mystery of risen life. 

The world of to-day is confronted with phenom- 
ena kindred in character. Proofs are obtainable 
of communications between beings in the spiritual 
world and beings in this world, and of the appear- 
ance, instinct with life and enhanced power, of 
persons whose physical bodies have been com- 
mitted to the dust. 

The influence of these facts on the religious 
thought of both epochs was, and is, enormous. 

When it was realized by men that the Jesus who 
had died, was after death a living, marvelous Spirit, 
endowed with higher powers, and moving on a 
more exalted plane of being, it revolutionized their 
ideas of human life and its possibilities. 

When men and women of this age shall have 
realized that they, in the essential part of their 
being, are spirit ; that, in spite of a physical en- 
vironment they are linked to a great universe of 
spirit, and that it is possible for the seen and the 
unseen, the temporal and the eternal, to be in vital 
touch and communion — then, and not until then, 
will the shadows and uncertainties in men's minds 
roll away, and the haunting dread of death disap- 
pear. Then, Religion will mean more to them than 



Doubters of the Spiritual 31 

the mere endorsement of a theological code; and 
the glorious Gospel of Jesus will come as a con- 
firming voice from heaven, stamping with the 
imprimatur of God their expectations of life beyond 
the grave and immortality. 

Thus, we regard these present-day manifestations 
of spirit-life and power as an ordering of God. 
They are doing their work, as the greater Manifes- 
tation on the first Easterday did its work. They 
are turning that great tide of Agnostic and Material- 
istic thought that threatened, on the enunciation of 
the doctrine of Evolution, to obliterate man's per- 
ception of the Spiritual. They are bringing millions 
of our race to realize the truth which the Bible has de- 
clared, but which we have but so imperfectly realized 
— that " God is a Spirit," and we are spirits; that at 
death there is no cessation of our being; that our 
removal from earthly existence does but usher us 
into a sphere of more abundant life and fuller ex- 
perience. 

And the doubters of these spiritual realities ? 
Well, those in the one class will do as the hierarchs 
and the ecclesiastics and others did in the Jerusalem 
of old. They will close their eyes to a God-given 
revelation. Those in the other class will do as the 
doubting Apostles did. They will open the mind to 



32 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

conviction, and set themselves in the track of en- 
lightenment. The latter will come to know the 
truth; the former will not. They, the prejudiced 
and unconvincible ones, must miss the inspiration 
and comfort of realizing, at the present time, things 
spiritual, and must wait for the higher revealments, 
which others gain, until the light of Another World 
shall have dawned upon them, and the mistakes of 
Time shall be rectified in Eternity. 



CHAPTER II 
OUR TOUCH OF THE SPIRITUAL BY PRAYER 

" I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the 
mind also." — i Cor. 14 : 15. 

In this age of awakening in regard to the realities 
of the Spiritual Universe, there is no subject that 
should more engross the thoughts of the earnest in- 
quirer than that of Prayer. Many, happily for 
themselves and for others, engage in the exercises 
of Prayer; but few, perhaps, rise to the realization 
of how much is involved in it. Most of us regard 
Prayer as little more than a means appointed by 
God, a condition laid down by Him, whereby cer- 
tain required blessings will be bestowed upon us. 
We pray because we want something, and God has 
said, "Ask, and ye shall receive." Some of us pray 
but a little, or pray not at all, because this sense of 
need is not experienced. 

But Prayer is far more than a requirement which 
God has attached to His blessing of us. It is an 
exercise to which pertains an astonishing and an all 
but incredible possibility. It is a means by which 



34 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

we can literally and actually come into contact with 
the World of Spirit. 

By Prayer, we may put ourselves in direct com- 
munication with God, in such a way as to really 
speak to Him, and touch Him with our vital self. 
By Prayer, we can cause our spirit, while encased 
in the flesh, to project itself, so as to transcend 
the finite, and soar into the infinite. By Prayer, 
men and women may get closer to the great 
All-Father of the vast Universe than they can 
get to any dear one on this earth. 

Oh ! yes, the possibility connected with Prayer is, 
assuredly, a startling one. It may be we have 
never paused to think about it. It may be it has 
not struck us, that it is on account of this possibil- 
ity that men have been so urged to pray, that the 
Bible lays such stress on the importance of this ex- 
ercise, and that the Saviour Christ as He passed 
across the stage of earth-life was so pre-eminently 
a Man of Prayer. I said the possibility attached to 
Prayer is a startling one; and is it not so ? At first 
thought, it does seem incredible that we, poor, fee- 
ble, faulty creatures, who are such tiny specks in the 
immensity around us, who know so very little, and 
are so hemmed in by the restrictions of the Phys- 
ical, may, nevertheless, by Prayer, soar above the 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 35 

limitations of Time and Space, and the laws that 
condition Matter, and may literally transport our 
vital self into a realm that is Spiritual, and cause 
that self to function in the same way as the Being 
of God and the beings of angels are functioning. 
But such is the possibility of Prayer; and our real- 
ization of that possibility will re-color and give 
definiteness to the whole of our religious ideas. 
Our knowledge of what we can do by Prayer will 
lead us to better understand the complexity and 
greatness of our own being. The words of the 
Psalmist, in speaking of man, will not appear to us 
a pious exaggeration — " Thou hast made him but 
little lower than God, and crownest him with glory 
and honor" (Ps. 8: 5, Revised Version). The 
knowledge of what our spirit self is capable of do- 
ing in the act of Prayer will enable us also to view 
more complacently the incident of dying. If we be 
conscious that our vital and essential self has con- 
stantly projected itself from its " earthly tabernacle," 
and has actually energized in the realm of spirit, the 
thought of leaving that tabernacle more completely 
and forever will not appal us. If my self has been 
able to touch the Spiritual, in spite of my having 
been heavily handicapped by a coarse physical 
body, what a reasonable thought that my contact 



36 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

with God and spiritual things will be closer — much 
closer, when that body shall have been left behind! 
Thus, the consciousness of the possibility of Prayer 
gives us a magnificent foundation for our hope of 
continued life after death. 

Before we pass on to consider more particularly 
this subject, it will not be out of place to note a fact 
that is very suggestive. 

Mankind has always had an ineradicable convic- 
tion that in some way or another great possibilities 
are bound up in Prayer. With respect to every Re- 
ligion, of whatsoever age, and under whatsoever 
conditions of human life, Prayer has always been 
considered an indispensable adjunct. Not only 
Christians and Jews, but Mohammedans, Parsees, 
Buddhists, Hindoos, and even Pagans have felt, 
and felt intensely, that they must pray. They 
have felt that some great end is attainable by Prayer. 
They, or many of them, not acquainted with the 
facts of scientific research with which we are 
familiar — the demonstrated facts of Telepathy and 
Telsesthesia — may not have been able to fully gauge 
the possibilities of Prayer; but, at all events, they 
have felt that Prayer has possibilities linked with it. 
They have believed that by Prayer they, in some 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 37 

way or another, could get into contact with God 
and spiritual realities. 

This all but universal instinct points, surely, to 
the possibility of such a contact. The great All- 
Father is no heartless mocker of His creatures. 
He would never have implanted in men this de- 
sire to pray, unless communion with them and 
Him could be established. Here, then, in the per- 
sistent prayers of mankind, we have an indication 
that God means us to be in touch with the Spir- 
itual. 

We face now the question — In what way does 
Prayer put us into direct communication with God ? 
In what sense do we actually "touch" the Great 
Father-Spirit when we pray ? This is a very im- 
portant question, and if we answer it correctly, we 
shall be enabled to determine whether our devo- 
tional exercises be really Prayers, or merely sem- 
blances of Prayer. 

With what part of our being do we pray? 
"With the lips," says some one. Not necessarily 
so. Undoubtedly, God intends that the physical 
part of our constitution should co-operate in the 
exercise of Prayer. The lips should speak to Him, 
the knees be bent to Him, and the body should as- 
sume an attitude in keeping with the fact that a 



38 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

suppliant creature is approaching the Creator. But 
it must always be remembered that these seemly ac- 
cessories of Prayer do not constitute Prayer, nor 
are they that which will ever achieve the possibility 
of Prayer. One may pray without using the lips. 
By training our spirit, we can speak to God, and 
come into the closest possible touch with Him, 
although the lips be unmoved and the eyes un- 
closed. 

We must not, however, infer from this that there 
is no advantage in an audible expression of Prayer. 
I am convinced that there is a very great advantage 
in employing our lips when we pray. The part of 
our being that unites itself to God will be helped 
thereby. If, in our private devotions, we softly ut- 
ter the thoughts we direct to God, so that we can 
hear the words, I am certain that we shall be more 
likely to really pray, than in remaining silent, and 
merely mentally picturing the words. 

Only we must remember that it is not by our lips 
we establish communication with our Father-God. 
It is the spiritual, not the physical, that prays. The 
lips are only a temporary vehicle through which the 
greater part of us may express itself. It is only our 
interior spiritual self — the "inner-man," as St. Paul 
calls it — that can pray. That is why he said, " I 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 39 

will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the 
mind also." 

It is important, then, to understand the truth 
about that "inner-man," and the way in which it 
functions in the act of Prayer. 

Our "inner-man" is a spirit, as God is; and as 
such it is the essence of us, and also the formative 
principle of all that in this world and in after life 
constitutes manhood. This spirit is our real self. 
It is not a shapeless, bodiless entity. It is encased 
in, and never dissociated from, a spiritual or etheric 
body. This is what St. Paul meant when he wrote 
— "There is a physical body, and there is (at 
the present time) a spiritual body" (1 Cor. 

15:44). 

The spirit plus its etheric body is what we term 
the " soul." A great many religious teachers speak 
of the soul as if it were a formless essence. They 
are wrong. The soul is a spiritual entity indissolu- 
bly united to an ethereal form. Our ethereally en- 
cased spirit — our soul — is within the physical body 
during earth-life, in order that we may be brought 
into relationship with the Physical, as the kindergar- 
ten school of our training. At death, this soul — 
our self — leaves its physical "tabernacle," not 
merely as a surviving essence, an indefinite life-prin- 



4° Thoughts of the Spiritual 

ciple; but as a spiritual being invested with a spirit- 
ual body. 

We must realize this truth, if we would rise to a 
full conception of Prayer, and also rob dying of its 
horrors. It will not suffice to convince one that a 
something of him will survive the incident of Death. 
He will be appalled at the experience, unless he is 
confident that, apart from his physical body, he will 
be a being in the shape of manhood. 

Now, in our soul there exists Mind— that mys- 
terious, spiritual principle in which are centred all 
our ideas, feelings, emotions and aspirations. 

Our spiritual self functions and expresses itself 
through Mind. If, therefore, Prayer be a contact 
between us, as spiritual beings, and the great 
Father-Spirit-God, it follows that Mind must play 
an all-important part in the transaction. And so it 
is. There can be no real Prayer in which Mind is 
not energizing. 

Then, again, Thought, as the manifestation of 
Mind, is not merely a set of abstract ideas, as so 
many suppose it to be. It is an intense reality; as 
much so as our spirit itself. Thought is an emana- 
tion, a force, from our spirit, as light and heat are 
emanations from the sun, and electrical energy is a 
force which proceeds from the source that gener- 



Out Touch of the Spiritual 41 

ates it. Consequently, Thought is spiritual. It is 
an outflowing of man's spirit, in the same way as 
the imparted power of the Holy Ghost is an out- 
flowing of God, and a beam of sunshine is an out- 
pouring of the sun. Moreover, because Thought is 
spiritual, the powers that pertain to spirit pertain 
also to Thought. Thought transcends the restric- 
tions of the Physical. Time and space are anni- 
hilated in regard to it. Thought, in the case of 
God, can leap across the gulfs of past aeons, and be 
conscious of everything as a continual Present. 
Thought, in the case of man, as yet a not fully de- 
veloped spirit, can project itself, and instantaneously 
transport itself anywhere, and can, when his spirit 
has been trained to it, sensibly touch a fellow-spirit 
in such a way as to make that fellow-spirit con- 
scious that between him and the thought-transmit- 
ting spirit a real contact has been effected. 

Science bears witness to the marvelous possibil- 
ities of Thought. Telepathy and Telaesthesia (t. e., 
the communication from a distance of impressions 
and perceptions from one mind to another, inde- 
pendently of the recognized channels of sense) are 
facts which will help us to rightly understand the 
nature of Prayer. 

Further, Thought, being an effluence of man's 



4-2 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

spirit, possesses creative power. It can produce 
shape : it can call into existence thought-forms. 
The objects of the Physical universe are the 
thoughts of God materialized. When we shall 
pass from the earth-life to the higher life of the 
Spiritual, that which we think will become visibly 
manifest to others. Our environment then will 
exactly correspond to the thought-forms we create. 
Our surroundings will be pleasant or unpleasant, 
beautiful or ugly, as our own mental condition shall 
have made them. It is a sobering truth, which, if 
realized, would make us more careful concerning 
the way in which we think. Even in this life, the 
character of our thought determines the character of 
our environment. The right-thinking man may 
taste the sweets of heaven even in a peasant's cot- 
tage; while the wrong-thinking man may experi- 
ence the miseries of hell in a palace. 

Then, further, our thoughts being spiritual things, 
do not die. The thought-waves and the thought- 
forms we project from our spiritual self are all reg- 
istered. They are impressed on the ethereal and 
electrical atmosphere of the Spiritual World, as the 
photograph of an object is delineated on the sensi- 
tized-plate. There they stand — those thoughts of 
ours and the thoughts of those countless millions 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 43 

who have gone hence — fixed and registered for 
God and others to read, and for ourselves also here- 
after to read. That is what is meant in Scripture, 
when, in referring to God's judgment of men, it is 
stated — " the books were opened." I have touched 
upon this subject of the wonderful powers and pos- 
sibilities of mind in order to show how directly it 
bears upon Prayer. We think, and in so doing 
send forth a vital spiritual emanation and force 
from ourself. The spirit of the man goes out in 
the thought-wave as literally and as actually as the 
being of the sun streams forth in its light and heat 
waves. Only by the action of our interior self — 
our spirit — can we pray. Prayer means the putting 
of ourself en rapport with God ; and God is a Spirit, 
and only spirit can touch spirit. 

What, then, must I do in order to really pray ? I 
must take hold of my mind, and use it as the force- 
transmitting instrument of my spirit. I must bring 
my will-power to bear upon my mind. The mind 
must be disciplined and coerced, so as to be made 
to concentrate itself, and thereby collect and focus 
that vital energy which is to be projected Godward. 
In this way my mind will become the obedient 
organ of my spirit, and I shall let loose a great 
spiritual force, which, sweeping aside the restric- 



44 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

tions of Time and Space, will rush forth to its Cor- 
respondence — the great Spirit-Receiver, God. My 
spirit will then kiss the Spirit of the All-Father. 

It maybe helpful if we consider now some of the 
conditions necessary for real Prayer. 

Our Saviour Christ, in those words— "When 
thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou 
hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in 
secret" — has clearly implied that there are condi- 
tions in regard to Prayer. Without insisting upon 
a compliance with the exact letter of His utterance, 
we can see in those words that He clearly recog- 
nized that there must be a rightful disposing of 
oneself to pray. 

But, first of all, we do well to realize that it is not 
an easy thing to pray. It is not an exercise that 
can be performed perfunctorily or mechanically, 
and without effort. We have only to note our 
Lord's attitude in regard to Prayer to perceive that 
He accounted earnestness and effort as prereq- 
uisites for it. The One who said — "Men ought 
always to pray, and not to faint" ; who spent 
whole nights in prayer on the uplands of Palestine; 
and who sweated drops of blood in Gethsemane in 
His effort to project His Spirit to God's Spirit, was 
not a Being who regarded Prayer as an exercise 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 45 

that could be lightly performed. No one more em- 
phasized the importance of Prayer than did Jesus. 
He knew that it was the means by which He, while 
passing through the earth-life, could keep His spirit 
in close and vital communion with God. 

When we realize the great possibility of Prayer, 
it becomes the most reasonable of all thoughts that 
the exercise of it must call for spiritual effort. It is 
no small thing to be able to connect our mind and 
spirit with the mind and spirit of the Supreme Head 
of the universe. To get into "touch" with a fel- 
low-creature is a great achievement. To get into 
"touch" with God is transcendently greater. This 
possibility connected with Prayer is the greatest of 
all possibilities open to man in this world and Beyond. 
No other possibility can be compared with it. What 
wonder, then, that its attainment should demand 
effort and earnestness. Moreover, we know that 
man does not attain to other great possibilities apart 
from effort. For example, it is not an easy thing to 
acquire knowledge. As a rule, it is an exceedingly 
difficult thing. It calls for concentration of mind 
and persistent effort. Nor is it an easy thing to 
develop within us the grace of unselfishness and 
those other graces that constitute the Christian 
character. Moral excellence is not attained except 



46 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

by the persistent exercise of will-power, and a 
struggle to keep the lower side of our nature in 
subordination to the higher. Is it not unreasonable, 
therefore, to expect that any human spirit can rise 
into affinity with the great All-Spirit, unless there 
be the bending of the mental powers to the accom- 
plishment of so great an end? 

There are many sincere and good persons who 
fail to realize the need of this effort in regard to 
Prayer. They are devout in a perfunctory and 
mechanical manner. They are to be admired for 
their attendance at Church Services, and for their 
scrupulous performance of private devotional ex- 
ercises, but all the time they fall short of arousing 
into spiritual activity their "inner-man," whereby 
their spirit lets loose a vital force which, function- 
ing through the medium of the mind, finds its way 
to God. In a word, they do not comply with the 
Apostolic injunction to "pray with the spirit and 
with the mind also." 

Without effort there can be no energizing of the 
spirit and the mind; and without that energizing 
there can be no real Prayer — no touching of God. 
No mere repetition of prescribed forms of devotion, 
and no listening to the too-often gabbled recitation 
of the beautiful Offices of our Church, in such a 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 47 

way as to make mental effort an impossibility both 
to clergyman and people, can ever avail in bringing 
our interior self into contact with God. Forms, 
ceremonies and Church ordinances are good and 
useful, if they help us really to pray; but not 
otherwise. Have I said aught that is calculated to 
discourage any one in regard to Prayer ? Certainly, 
1 have no intention of doing that. On the con- 
trary, my aim is to incite my readers and myself to 
become more really praying men and women. 1 
want to make us dissatisfied with mere mechanical 
praying. I wish to help us to perceive that Prayer 
is potent with a possibility infinitely greater than 
many have supposed; and because of that, it calls 
for earnest and persistent mental effort. 

I have words of encouragement for all who 
desire really to pray. 

We can train ourselves to this great exercise. 
The power to accomplish will come with practice. 
Men train themselves to think, or to speak, or to 
sing well, and they attain their object by effort and 
perseverance. We, too, may so tutor and control 
our indwelling spirit, as at length to make it pos- 
sible for it to touch God in the act of Prayer. Let 
the training be continued, and the end sought will 
at length be comparatively easily attained. The 



48 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

one who has devoted care upon the cultivation of 
his mind or voice, at last becomes able to think 
easily or sing well. It is so in regard to our spirit 
and Prayer. 

For a while our spirit may seem incapable of 
doing what we wish it to do. Really desiring to 
set up this vital union between God and ourself, to 
do so may seem to be beyond our spirit's power. 
Well, that must not dishearten us, nor cause us to 
relax our efforts. If, at first, we fail in obtaining 
the consciousness that we have touched God, we 
must remember that God Himself will help our 
efforts to do as He has bidden us. Importing a 
fuller significance into the words of that petition of 
the disciples to the Master, we shall cry — " Lord, 
teach us to pray — teach me so to train my spirit 
that it may touch Thy Divine Spirit." 

Further, we must remember that our spirit may 
touch God through the medium of our subliminal 
mind, although our supra-liminal mind may not be 
wholly conscious of it. Science has demonstrated 
the existence of two minds within us. The sublimi- 
nal mind is that which lies below the threshold 
(limeri) of ordinary consciousness, as opposed to 
the supra-liminal mind which lies above the thresh- 
old. There are excitations — thoughts, feelings and 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 49 

faculties — which do not rise into direct notice. 
They lie beneath that point at which we come into 
conscious relationship with external physical things. 
These excitations are termed subliminal; they are 
kept submerged, not on account of their weakness, 
but by the constitution of man's personality. This 
threshold of ordinary consciousness may be likened 
to a level — a slab washed by the sea — above which 
the waves of subliminal perception may, but do not 
always, rise. 

Now, in the act of really praying, we cause our 
spirit to function, and in so doing, the powers of 
our subliminal mind are brought into action; and 
our spirit may touch God through the medium of 
this subliminal mind, although the supra-liminal 
mind may not be conscious of that touching. Our 
spirit may have projected itself through a part of us 
that has not risen above the level of ordinary con- 
sciousness. 

There is encouragement, surely, in this fact, for 
those who set themselves really to pray. If we 
have fulfilled the conditions of real Prayer; i. e., if 
we have prayed "with the spirit and with the 
mind," we need not distress ourself because as yet 
we cannot fully realise what our spirit has done. 
Our subliminal self, without the consciousness of 



50 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

the supra-liminal self, may have projected itself 
God ward. Our " inner-man " may have done that 
which our outer-man fails to realize. 

May it not be, moreover, that this inability at 
times on the part of our supra-liminal mind to 
realize that there has been this subliminal touching 
of God, is appointed by Him, in order to teach us 
that Prayer is no soul exercise that can be listlessly 
and lackadaisically performed by any one ? There 
have often been times, in my own experience, 
when, having earnestly set myself to attain the 
possibility of Prayer, I have arisen from the exer- 
cise with no fixed conviction that I have succeeded 
in so doing. At such times, I may have established 
a God-contact, although my supra-liminal mind has 
been unconscious of it. But, if I have not estab- 
lished it, if my spirit has absolutely failed to rise 
Godward, I do not think the Heavenly Father has 
been angry or disappointed with me. The good 
earthly father is not displeased with his boy who 
sets himself earnestly to accomplish a great task, 
but fails at first. The desire to unite my spirit 
with God's Spirit has been put within me by God 
Himself. He knows my difficulties. He will, 
assuredly, help me in my efforts. I have but to 
persistently fix my eye on the goal to which I 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 51 

aspire, and to try and try again. I have but to say 
to my inner self — " I desire — I mean, to touch God 
by my spirit through Prayer. I know it to be a 
great achievement. I am aware it will call for 
earnest and engrossing effort. 1 know it will 
involve a going forth from me of a ' virtue ' — a 
vital energy from my interior manhood — as it did 
from the Christ when He did great things; but, God 
helping me, I will attain that possibility." 

Any one who assumes this tone of mind has 
taken the first step in preparing the highway, along 
which the spirit of man can go forth to meet the 
Spirit of God. 

1. Prayer demands a disciplining of the mind. 
The mind, as we have seen, is the handmaid of the 
spirit, and is the medium through which the spirit 
can project itself to God. Consequently, it must 
be adapted to the purpose it has to serve. It has 
to be adjusted in such a way as to make it capable 
of becoming the vehicle of the spirit. The mind 
left undisciplined and uncontrolled, renders Prayer 
an impossibility. It is not acting as the transmitter 
of the vital force of the spirit, and no communica- 
tion with God can be set up. 

The effort must be made to cause the mind to 
temporarily lay aside its activities in regard to things 



52 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

pertaining to ordinary life. The concerns of the 
Physical must be made to recede into the back- 
ground of the consciousness, in order that the mind 
may exert its higher energies on the plane of the 
Spiritual. That is essential to its co-operating with 
our interior self in the great spiritual act of ap- 
proaching God. The mind that is permitted to 
wander to, and be preoccupied by, that which con- 
cerns only our lower environment, is of no service 
to the spirit in Prayer. In the very act of not 
spiritually disposing itself it renders itself incapable 
of being the medium of the spirit's impulses and 
projection. 

We have to train our mind, therefore, to think 
toward the Spiritual. 

That is an achievement which may not be easy 
at first; but it can be done by practice, and by 
the observance of a few simple rules in regard to 
praying. 

(a') We should pause for a moment or two before 
commencing to pray. It is a mistake to imagine 
that we can project our spirit toward God, if our 
mind be not realizing what it is called upon to 
do. The effort must be made to cause our supra- 
liminal mind to become for the time being passive. 
While we are praying, it must cease to be occupied 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 53 

with the things and concerns of our ordinary con- 
sciousness. External physical objects must be shut 
out, and all thoughts not connected with the exer- 
cise in which we are engaged must be excluded. 
The subliminal mind, which is the principal medium 
through which our spirit functions, must be able to 
project its spiritual excitations into the supra-liminal 
mind, so that both minds in the act of Prayer may 
be acting in concert with the spirit. But the supra- 
liminal mind cannot receive the excitations of the 
subliminal mind, if the former be absorbed with 
thoughts that only pertain to the non-spiritual. 
The one who attempts to pray, but at the same 
time allows his supra-liminal mind to be engrossed 
with thoughts about his business, his pleasures, 
and other mundane concerns, will not be able to 
pray. The vital force projected by the spirit may 
pass through the subliminal mind of the man; but 
it will go no further. It will fail to find a passage 
through his supra-liminal mind, because that mind 
is not so adjusted as to receive the impulses of the 
Spiritual. 

Hence, in Prayer, the effort must be made to 
bring our supra-liminal mind into a condition of 
passivity. It must stop for a while its energizing 
on the plane of the Physical and the ordinary, and 



54 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

hold itself in readiness to respond to the prompt- 
ings of our spirit. 

One of the means whereby this condition of 
mental passivity can be attained, is by pausing for 
a moment or two before we commence to pray. 
To stop our ordinary thinking; to make our mind 
a blank; and to do nothing and think nothing for a 
brief space. Perhaps, there is nothing more help- 
ful than this in attuning our mind to pray. The 
Psalmist, no doubt, perceived the value of this 
surcease of mental activity in regard to things 
external, as a means of facilitating spiritual energy, 
when he wrote — "Commune with your own heart 
upon your bed, and be still" (Ps. 4: 4). 

(b) We may further discipline our mind for 
Prayer by auto-suggestion ; i. e., by suggestion made 
by ourself to ourself. My self is my spirit, and 
indissolubly linked to my spirit is my subliminal 
mind. This subliminal mind may, by suggestion, 
impress the supra-liminal mind in such a way as 
to bring it into tune with the subliminal mind, 
which latter is more readily responsive to the im- 
pulses of the spirit than is the supra-liminal mind. 
It is a case of the "inner-man" speaking to and 
influencing the outer-man. Apart from the ques- 
tion of Prayer, we may easily demonstrate the 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 55 

power and advantage of auto-suggestion. For 
example. Suppose a person be inclined to allow 
his mind to become gloomy and pessimistic in 
regard to the affairs of temporal environment. It 
will be of the greatest advantage to him, if he can 
cause the subliminal part of himself to vigorously 
suggest to his supra-liminal part something better. 
If that man can bring himself to constantly and 
emphatically say — " I will not be gloomy and pessi- 
mistic; I will be bright and hopeful," — he will very 
soon rise into a better condition of mind. The one 
who has trained himself to cause his inner-self to 
rightly suggest to that part of his self which is 
more nearly in contact with things external, will 
escape no end of evils, mental and physical. Every 
doctor of the mind or body knows the value of 
auto-suggestion in regard to therapeutics. 

Apply this principle to Prayer. Let the "inner- 
man" of you speak to that mind of yours which is 
acting in relation to things external; let it say (and 
speak the words aloud, so that the physical ears 
may hear it) — "You must help my spirit in this 
magnificent possibility of touching the great All- 
Spirit. I will you to cease, for a while, your ener- 
gizings on the plane of the ordinary; I will you to 
forget, for the time being, aught else but that you, 



56 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

who art part of myself, should co-operate with my 
higher being in this exalted exercise." 

Let this be done earnestly and persistently, and it 
will not be long before the supra-liminal mind will 
be able, very readily and easily, to co-operate with 
the higher part of our being in the exercise of Prayer. 

(0 It will help us to discipline our mind for 
Prayer if we set ourself to expect something as 
the result of the exercise. We too often pray 
without any real expectation of attaining that 
for which we pray. For instance, we pray to be 
able to get into communion with God and to be 
able to realize that we have done so. But all the 
time, we do not really expect that our spirit will 
have the realization of such a communion. What 
is the result? We do not get that realization. 
Why ? Because we did not actually expect it. 
We prayed, perhaps, merely from a sense of 
duty; because it was, we thought, the right 
thing to do; because in some way or another, 
we imagined it would be good for us to do so. 
But we did not expect to be conscious that our 
spirit had touched God; and as a consequence we 
did not become conscious of that fact. And so our 
prayers seemed to us to be barren and profitless 
exercises. 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 57 

But assume the other tone; confidently expect 
to realise that we have touched God ; and all will be 
different. We shall rise from prayer feeling and 
knowing that a direct communication between God 
and us has been effected. 

The influence of this realization upon our supra- 
liminal mind will be great. It will be one of the 
foremost of incentives to this part of our being to 
co-operate with our spirit. 

2. There is another important condition in 
regard to real Prayer. We must detach our- 
selves in spirit and mind from the objects and 
concerns of physical environment. We can best 
do this by being quite alone when we pray. The 
Lord Jesus Christ taught this when He said — 
"When thou pray est, enter into thy closet, and 
when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy 
Father." 

The presence of others is a distracting influence 
to the spirit in its effort to project itself to God. 
The Master, we know, often prayed when others 
were near Him. He prayed in the Temple-courts, 
when a crowd of disciples and ecclesiastics and 
strangers were standing by; He prayed in that 
Garden of Gethsemane when three Apostles were 
within sight of Him; He prayed on that cross 



58 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

when the very atmosphere of hell was surround- 
ing Him; but His supremest efforts in Prayer, 
His grandest touchings of God by His spirit, 
were when the world was sleeping, and He was 
quite alone on those uplands of Galilee. 

The Christ never said aught to minimize the 
duty and importance of public Prayer — on the 
contrary, He promised a special blessing to the 
two or three gathered together in His name; — 
but He did show, by action and word, that the 
greatest achievement of Prayer is only possible 
when we are quite alone, and the door has been 
shut on the external. Would we then, after we 
have so disciplined our mind as to make it the 
handmaid of the spirit, project our essential self 
to God ? We must go apart, then, as Jesus did. 
We must be alone with God. Even our nearest 
and dearest ones, in their bodily presence, must 
be absent. Anywhere we may be; it matters 
not where; so long as we be alone. In the 
quiet and deserted church, in the door-closed 
chamber, in the still and darkened bedroom, in 
the seclusion of the country road or lane, on the 
moorland, in the forest, by the seashore — any- 
where, everywhere, where others are not. Then 
will it be possible for our spiritual self to focus 



Our Touch of the Spiritual 59 

its energies and rise Godward; and Prayer will 
become an intense reality to us; because by it we 
shall be conscious that the gulf between the seen 
and the Unseen; the finite and the Infinite, has 
been bridged, and our child-spirit has kissed the 
great Parent-Spirit — God. 



CHAPTER III 

OURSELVES IN RELATION TO THOSE 
BEHIND THE VEIL 

" The communion of saints." — Apostles' Creed. 

" As touching the resurrection (Greek dvd/TTaffti, i. <?., the ad- 
vancement) of « the dead,' have ye not read that which was 
spoken to you by God, saying — ' I am the God of Abraham, 
and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob ' ? God is not 
the God of the dead, but of the living." — Matt. 22: 31, 32. 

St. Matthew, in commenting upon the utterance 
of the Saviour as embodied in the second of the 
above passages, states — "the multitude were as- 
tonished at His doctrine." 

That fact, in view of the ordinary interpreta- 
tion given to these words of Jesus is in itself 
astonishing. 

"Were astonished " 1— but at what? If His 
words constitute, as we have been so often assured 
they do, an argument for the resuscitation of the 
dead physical bodies of the Departed on some 
future day, why were the Jews astonished at what 
He said ? He was, it is true, speaking directly to 
those who denied the fact of spirit and of life after 



Those Behind the Veil 61 

death — the materialistic Sadducees; but the greater 
part of that crowd listening to Him believed in a 
future resurrection. They held the idea that the 
earthly body, which is disintegrated in the grave, 
and whose constituent particles are requisitioned for 
the building up of other physical bodies, will some 
day be restored to a particular one of the beings or 
material objects that have held a temporary pro- 
prietorship of it. It never seemed to strike them, 
that inasmuch as the particles composing the 
physical body of any person are constantly chang- 
ing, and becoming the particles of the body of 
some one, or something, else, it would be impos- 
sible to assign a final proprietorship of them to one 
person without depriving others of the same right. 
They believed — did those Jews — that physical death 
involved a complete, or a very disastrous, interrup- 
tion of life. With it would come an interval of 
nonentity— a blank— an oblivion, or at best, a 
trance-like condition, or semi-consciousness — and 
afterward, in the far future, a resurrection, or a 
return to bodily organization. 

Not grasping the truth concerning the life Behind 
the Veil, they spoke of the departed, as many 
Christians and the Church herself have spoken of 
them — as "the dead," "the holy dead"; and resur- 



62 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

rection was viewed as God's call to these dead ones 
to rejoin the ranks of the living. 

That was the idea concerning Resurrection held 
by the Jews in the time of Jesus, and it is the idea 
which has colored the theology of Western Chris- 
tendom all through succeeding centuries. 

Is it the right idea ? Was our Saviour Christ 
referring to a distant resurrection at all, when in 
the words to which we are alluding He spoke about 
an anastasis ? If He were — if in those words He 
was presenting no new thought, and only voicing 
the commonly-accepted notion of Resurrection — as 
expressed, e. g., by Martha, when she said — "I 
know that he (Lazarus) shall rise again in the resur- 
rection at the last day " — then how comes it — we 
ask — that "the multitude were astonished at His 
doctrine" ? 

We contend that the astonishment on the part of 
Christ's hearers was a proof that His idea of Resur- 
rection was not theirs, and that He was teaching 
something variant from accepted ideas. 

Granting, then, that Jesus was not endorsing the 
crude and popular notion, but was proclaiming an 
unrealized truth, one may perceive the cause of 
those Jews' astonishment. 

He speaks of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who had 



Those Behind the Veil 63 

departed this life, as they were always spoken of — 
"the dead," and a moment afterward asserts — 
" God is not the God of the dead." 

I can imagine an indignant rabbi in that listening 
crowd turning to those beside him, and saying — 
" Did you hear what that heretic said ? He asserts 
that God is not the dead patriarchs' God." 

And yet the Master was right. 

In considering the great truth about which our 
Saviour was speaking on this occasion, it may be 
well to show how unsatisfactory and illogical is His 
utterance, if it be made to apply to the subject of a 
future resurrection. 

Those who so apply it convict the Christ of 
arguing inconsequentially. From two correct prem- 
ises they make Him deduce an illogical conclusion. 

If these words of Jesus be taken, as they are 
commonly, but mistakenly, taken, as an argument 
for future physical resurrection, they prove nothing. 
Our Lord is made to reason inconclusively — as fol- 
lows — 

God is not the God of dead persons: 

Of dead Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He says, 

" I am (i. e., I still am) their God " : 
Therefore — These three patriarchs will some 
day be resurrected to life. 



64 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

But suppose our Lord was not referring at all to 
a future event, but to that which takes place at the 
death of man's physical body, then His reasoning 
becomes perfectly clear and consistent. 

This was the argument of Jesus — "Now as 
touching the anastasis (the advancement) of those 
whom you, in your ignorance, term 'the dead,' 
have ye not read that which was spoken to you by 
God, saying — 'I am (not I was, or shall be) the 
God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac and the 
God of Jacob ' ? Now, God is not the God of dead 
persons, but of the living, and this statement of 
God is not true unless those three men were alive 
after death." 

Put into the syllogistic form, our Lord's argu- 
ment was perfectly logical. 

God is not the God of dead persons: 

After their physical dissolution, He said of 

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, " I am their God " : 

Therefore — Those three men must have been 

alive when that statement of God was made. 

The Saviour's utterance is logical in regard to 
continued life at physical dissolution: it is hope- 
lessly illogical in regard to a not-as-yet accom- 
plished resurrection. 

Further, it is noteworthy that the anastasis of 



Those Behind the Veil 65 

which our Lord spoke is represented not as an 
event of the future, but as something that is taking 
place now and continuously. St. Luke, in record- 
ing this utterance of Jesus, writes — "Now that 'the 
dead' are being advanced." (Greek, kysipovrai.) 
The verb is not in the future tense, but in the 
present, and denotes present continued action. 
That is a very important point, because so many 
who expound this passage treat the sentence as if 
Christ had said — "Now that 'the dead' shall be 
raised." 

Moreover, the adoption of the Latin word " res- 
urrection " as a translation of the Greek word 
dvaaroKTis (anastasis) is most unfortunate, and has 
caused mankind to lose sight of a great truth. The 
two words are not of like significance. The prepo- 
sition ana, in the word anastasis, denotes up- 
ward or forward, while "re," in the word " resur- 
rection," signifies backward. Anastasis suggests 
the idea of an advance or an ascent, and as the 
Fathers of the early Eastern Church described it — 
the passage of a being from a lower to a higher 
plane of life and experience. From the Latin word 
"Resurrection" has come the materialistic notion 
of the soul's return to the physical body — a 
resuscitated dead body rising up out of its grave: 



66 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

an idea not contained in the Greek word anas- 

tasis. 

There is an anastasis, or advancement, that 
comes at physical death, when the " inner-man" — 
the spirit encased in its spirit-body, leaves the 
earthly tabernacle, and rises into a higher phase of 
existence. We do not think that this is the only 
anastasis. There may be many goings-forward in 
the Spiritual World, and we believe there will be 
one great consummating anastasis when the per- 
fected man-spirit shall be made in spiritual bodily 
presence like his redeeming Saviour. 

But it is not of this final anastasis that Jesus was 
speaking when He said— "Now that 'the dead' 
are being advanced." He was speaking of that 
raising that takes place at death; of the condition 
of those who have gone Behind the Veil. 

It is of them we wish to speak— those "raised 
men and women " (to make use of a well-known 
Hebrew idiom), who in vacating their earthly 
" tabernacle " have been transported to higher life 
and greater possibilities. 

Those Behind the Veil! Those who have lived 
out, worked out, played out, sobbed out, in some 
cases, their brief earth-life, and passed hence! We 
think of them in their inconceivable number. It is 



Those Behind the Veil 67 

computed that at every tick of the clock by night 
and day a human soul passes from the world of the 
Physical to that of the Spiritual. We think of 
them tenderly and regretfully (if we be Christians 
in spirit as well as in name), because, alas! millions 
of them have lived this life and gone out of it 
without God, without Christ, and without hope; 
and the Christ has told us of a "darkness with- 
out," and many of them will have to grope in that 
miserable darkness before they find their way to 
God. 

Poor, handicapped ones! whose earthly environ- 
ment was such that it would have been the marvel 
of marvels if they had known God and goodness in 
this life. Poor, unfavored ones! as much loved by 
the All-Father as you and I, and who yet, for some 
reason, that the theologians cannot explain, were 
never permitted in the earth-life even to know the 
Name of the saving Jesus; or if they heard of Him, 
could not understand His message of salvation 
amid the wranglings and doctrinal mystifications 
of the religious ones. Poor, unsaved souls! who 
would, in all probability, have been ever so much 
better than we are, had God but given them half 
our privileges. Poor ignorant souls! who died 
with no idea except of death, and in the very act 



68 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

of dying, awoke to the realization that " there is no 
death: what seems so is transition." 

Poor astonished, dumbfounded souls! who, be- 
cause of the crude way in which it had been pre- 
sented to them, had thought religion to be nonsense, 
and then had been confronted with the vastness 
and wonder of a World of Spirit. Poor, lost sheep! 
who thoughtlessly wandered from the Good Shep- 
herd. Poor, lost pieces of Divine coinage! who 
because of their helplessness became the victims of 
the attracting forces of evil, and lay hidden for a 
while in the darkness and defilement. Poor, 
wretched prodigals! who in their life on earth de- 
liberately turned their back upon their Father, and 
in that Other Country have to face the loneliness, 
the shame, the beggary, the spiritual hunger and 
the rags, before they can arise and go to Him. 
Millions of all such are there among the number of 
those Behind the Veil. 

Yes, and millions of others, too; souls who must 
be differently classed. Those who, when living in 
the flesh, realized their relationship to God, and 
lived in communion with Him and tried to serve 
Him. Those who had grown into Christlikeness 
on earth, and then went to be God's ministering 
angels to those unsaved Beyond. Some who had 



Those Behind the Veil 69 

been believers in the Christ, but had left the 
" lower-school " before the warps and twists and 
imperfections of their character had been put right, 
and the spiritual cavities filled up. Others, poor, 
bruised reeds! who long ago might have given 
forth sweet music among the perfect organ-pipes of 
Divine Harmony, but somehow or another got out 
of tune, and have gone where the Master Christ 
will bring them into God-adjustment. 

We think of all these Behind the Veil — that vast 
aggregation of human entities, who have thought 
and felt, and lived and sinned, and sorrowed and 
suffered as we are doing, and then passed away out 
of sight; that mighty unceasingly-flowing stream 
of Human-Consciousness that has been sweeping 
across the sands of Time for hundreds of centuries 
and has discharged itself into God's great ocean of 
Eternity. 

All Souls! What of them ? Does the great All- 
Father think and care about the unsaved ones among 
them now ? Is the atmosphere of His love still en- 
wrapping them ? Are there any possibilities of 
blessing in regard to them ? Is the Saviour Christ, 
" the Same yesterday, and to-day, and all through 
the aeons," — still doing as He did in the lower earth- 
life — going after the lost sheep ? There have been 



70 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

many who have told us that the All-Father is only 
concerned about unsaved souls as long as they are 
in this life, and that when death ends their physical 
existence, His concern is extinguished. We have 
been told that Infinite Love enwraps God's human 
creatures as long as the material life is in them, but 
that afterward, that Love is turned to Vengeance 
and relentless Hate. We have been told by learned 
expounders of Religion, certain of their own salva- 
tion, that there is no possibility of recovery after 
death for any unblessed ones; that the unchange- 
able Jesus is not the Seeker of the lost souls through 
the aeons, but only as long as those lost souls are on 
this side of the frontier-line of Time. The Chris- 
tian Church, on the part of some of her members, 
has inculcated the practice of praying for the ones 
Behind the Veil; but not for all, and not for those 
who most want the prayers. She has set aside a 
day of the year for the Commemoration of "All 
Souls " ; but she did not mean all ; she only meant 
the "faithful" departed. She has not gauged the 
full significance of the Saviour's words — "God so 
loved the world." And so as we think of that vast 
multitude on the Other Side, we are dissatisfied 
with what has been thought and taught concerning 
them. We betake ourselves to our Bible, and when 



Those Behind the Veil 71 

we have rejected the mistranslations in it, and read 
it as the early Eastern Fathers read it, and as the 
later Latin Fathers failed to read it, a glorious hope 
in regard to all Behind the Veil takes possession of 
us. Not as "the dead," but as the living, do we 
think of them. The words of the Son of God ring 
in our ears — " He is not a God of the dead; for all 
live unto Him." Not as creatures outside the love 
of God and the possibilities of salvation do we 
picture them. Whether on this side of the Border- 
line or on the other side, all souls are the property 
of God and come within His "Purpose of the 
ages." The words of David — the man who lived 
in the twilight of revelation, come to us — "The 
Lord is good to all ; and His tender mercies are over 
all His works." 

The words of the truth-revealing Jesus cast a 
glorious hope upon the future of the human race — 
"I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." 
The prophetic utterance of St. Paul confirms these 
words of the Christ, and points to a "restitution," 
foreseen by prophet and poet, but lost sight of by 
the theologian ; when at the end of the aeons God 
shall be "all in all" Thus, in the light of the real 
Gospel of God, in contradistinction to what has been 
called "Gospel," we get a total reversal of our ideas 



72 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

in regard to the Departed. Instead of terming them 
"the dead," "the blessed (or unblessed) dead," we 
call them, on the Master's authority, "the living." 
Instead of regarding them as having been injured by 
death, we believe they were benefited by it. It 
ushered them into a higher phase of life and expe- 
rience. It was an anasiasis — a going forward. 
The Master said so. Their thoughts did not perish 
in the grave, as David in his unenlightenment sup- 
posed. Bodily dissolution freed the mind from 
physical restrictions, to act more vigorously on 
another plane. Instead of supposing that at dying 
they completed their education, we believe that then 
they only moved on to a " higher school." The 
"kindergarten" of the Physical was left behind for 
the more advanced training of the Spiritual. In- 
stead of imagining that death, which stripped them 
of their earthly encasement, left them as bodiless 
entities, we believe that it did but liberate an interior 
spiritual self clothed with a spirit-body, and that in 
this spirit-body, after dying, men and women are 
as real and manlike and womanlike as before. In- 
stead of thinking of them as those whose condition 
has been unalterably fixed for good or bad, we be- 
lieve that the condition of no soul, saint or sinner, 
is stereotyped at death. Both alike, in obedience to 



Those Behind the Veil 73 

the law of God's universe, must move onward to 
the higher. Instead of supposing that death has 
placed any man or woman, however fallen and de- 
based, outside the pale of God's love and mercy, 
and beyond the possibility of recovery, we believe 
that no soul is so placed. Sin and alienation from 
God entail awful experiences upon a human spirit; 
but behind those experiences lie the love and power 
of God and His Purpose in regard to " His off- 
spring." That purpose is to recover and save by 
grace, or by judgment, that which is lost. It can- 
not be frustrated by evil. If, at the end of the 
aeons, but one soul were irremedially ruined, the 
statement of St. Paul that Christ is "the Saviour of 
all men" would not be true; nor would Jesus' 
prophecy be fulfilled, that He will draw all men 
unto Himself; nor would that foretold by prophet 
and apostle and poet ever come to pass — "the resti- 
tution of all things." 

There can be no logical compromise in regard to 
this matter. Every soul Beyond the Veil, howso- 
ever circumstanced, is within the embrace of Al- 
mighty Love, and, sooner or later, pleasantly or 
painfully, must find its way to the Home of the All- 
Father's Bosom; or the Christ claimed to do more 
than He would be able to accomplish, and the Bible 



74 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

ascribes to Him an all-extensive Saviourship to 
which He is not entitled. 

In the light of the teaching of Western Theology 
we dare only think about the favored ones in the 
World Beyond. In the light of the better teaching 
of the early Eastern Church, and in accordance with 
the Gospel of a Bible correctly translated and 
rightly understood, we dare think hopefully and 
trustfully about all in that World. "All souls are 
Mine," has God said — and like the Eastern Fathers, 
we shudder at the bare supposition that there is any 
power in the universe that can finally alienate God's 
possessions from Him. As one by one our fellow- 
creatures pass from the Seen to the Unseen, we read 
over their mortal bodies, in the Burial-lesson, those 
magnificent words which half the Christian world 
does not believe — " Then cometh the end (the fulfil- 
ment of the saving Purpose of God) . . . that 
God may be all in all." 

Of course, the realization of these truths concern- 
ing those who have passed Beyond the Veil, will 
completely alter our mental attitude and conduct in 
regard to the Departed. With the acceptance of 
the teaching of the Saviour and a better understand- 
ing of the scope of His redeeming work, will come 
the conviction that an unbroken relationship still 



Those Behind the Veil 75 

exists between us and them, and that communion, 
in a very real sense, is a possibility. 

The mental attitude of the ordinary Christian 
toward the Departed is a very cheerless one. Like 
Martha, he believes in a resurrection "at the last 
day," but that thought brings no more comfort to 
him than it did to her. In the presence of death, 
the mourning heart cries out for a living dear one, 
and no doctrine of a future restoration to life can 
possibly remove the horrors of the grave. Nothing 
but the absolute conviction that the dear one is not 
dead, but living, can do that. The fact that the 
Departed are now living is admitted by Christians ; 
but it is not realized. If it were realized, the 
departure of a dear one would be viewed in a very 
different light from what it generally is. Had the 
Christian world really grasped the Saviour's teach- 
ing of "Advancement and Life," our funeral 
ceremonies would not have assumed the char- 
acter of symbolizations of pagan hopelessness 
and despair, nor would our churchyards have been 
made hideous by the emblems of perishable mor- 
tality. Instead of the Gospelless inscriptions we 
put on our grave stones, we should inscribe the 
words of the angel— " He is not here: he is 
risen." 



76 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

Yes, the ordinary conception concerning the 
Departed is a truly depressing one. The thoughts 
of the bereaved focus themselves on a dead body 
lying in a grave, and not upon a living being whose 
life is infinitely more intense than it was before. 
Death seems to open a gulf, a separation between 
us and those we love, and the religious teaching 
that has obtained currency as "orthodoxy," has 
done little or nothing to bridge that gulf. Multitudes 
of Christians who, Sunday after Sunday, profess 
their belief in "the communion of saints," have not 
the least idea what that communion means. Tell 
them that between us and those Behind the Veil a 
vital and energizing relationship still exists: they 
will not understand you. Speak to them of the 
possibility of a discarnate spirit and mind com- 
municating with an incarnate spirit and mind, and 
they will stare at you in blank amazement. Inform 
them that there exists a world-wide testimony to 
the fact that thousands of men and women, after 
they had passed hence, have been seen and spoken 
to by those whom they have left behind on earth: 
they will tell you plainly it is incredible. Suggest 
to them that they should pray for the Departed: 
they will assure you that such prayers, if not down- 
right wicked, are utterly useless, and that your sug- 



Those Behind the Veil 77 

gestion of them is a sure indication that you have 
been deceived by Satan. 

It is true that some Christians pray for those 
who are gone, but their prayers are only for the 
"faithful Departed," and so the vast majority of 
those Behind the Veil are left unprayed for by the 
Christian Church — that Instrument which exists for 
furthering the Purpose of the Christ to draw all men 
unto Himself. 

Again, the ordinary Christian teaching concerning 
the unsaved ones in that vast aggregation of human 
souls Beyond the Veil is an appallingly cheerless and 
hopeless one. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter 
here," is the motto that so-called " Orthodoxy " has 
set up over the portals of the Spiritual World for all 
except the " faithful "; and it means that the greater 
proportion of the human race is doomed at death to 
irremedial loss and ruin. 

Fortunately, no one logically and really believes 
in the doctrine that at death a person's condition is 
stereotyped and his destiny unalterably fixed for all 
eternity. Many suppose it is the correct thing to 
believe it, and try to persuade themselves that they 
believe it. But all the time it is not believed. If 
men and women, in whom is existing a particle of 



78 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

the Spirit of Christ, did believe it, they would be- 
come insane. 

No loving man or woman, whose wife, or child, 
or dear one has passed hence in a condition which 
could not be called "saved," could possibly retain 
his or her reason, if it were really believed that 
death places a human soul beyond the reach of 
God's redeeming Love. 

Thank God! — for the happiness of humanity — 
man's intuitive instincts are better than his formu- 
lated creeds. The hope is secretly cherished that 
the grace of God, because it is the grace of an 
Infinite Being, must and will operate beyond the 
limits defined by a narrow theology. No Christian, 
however staunch to the pitiless teaching of the 
school to which he belongs, ever brings himself 
really to think that any one beloved by him in the 
World Beyond is irretrievably lost. His creed, per- 
haps, gives him no hope in regard to that one who 
died without religion; but his own heart refuses to 
surrender its hope; and so he keeps his reason and 
his faith in God. 

How different become our thoughts and our con- 
duct in respect to the Departed, when we accept 
Christ's teaching and understand His Gospel! How 
the exclusiveness, the heartlessness and the selfish- 



Those Behind the Veil 79 

ness in our Religion fall away, and leave us nobler- 
minded men and women 1 How the Gospel, then, 
really becomes a Gospel, and not merely good news 
for the few, and very bad news for the many! 

In the light of the words of Jesus, the world 
Beyond the Veil becomes a World of enhanced life 
and unbounded hope. Not peopled is it by human 
entities who are drowsily existing in expectation of 
a summons at a distant day to renewed powers and 
activity; but by men and women whose mental 
and spiritual faculties have been quickened by that 
touch of death, which has set them free from the 
restricting and obscuring influences of physical 
environment. Nor, in that World, do we picture 
these beings of quickened life as constituting two 
great and opposite classes — the one embracing 
those whom the Almighty is keeping for ages in 
the miserable anticipation of that stroke of Divine 
vengeance which shall hurl them into irretrievable 
ruin; the other, that class of expectantly blissful 
ones, who are so unlike the Christ that the knowl- 
edge of their fellows' intolerable woes does not 
mar their happiness. 

No, with the words of Jesus ringing in our ears 
— " They all live unto God," and those other words 
which strike the key-note of the real Gospel — "God 



80 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

so loved the world," and " I will draw all men unto 
Me," our thoughts of those Beyond the Veil become 
irradiated with all-glorious hope. It is obvious that 
the acceptance of the views expressed above will 
have an important bearing (as we have said) upon 
our sense of the communion that can exist between 
us and those who have passed into risen-life. 

One of the greatest achievements of the present 
age has been the scientific demonstration of the 
possibilities of Mind. Telepathy has opened up to 
us a new world of thought in regard to a power 
inherent in man, independent of the physical side 
of his constitution. The investigation of the sub- 
ject by scientific men has established the fact 
that, in spite of all conditions of Time and Space, 
one person can communicate to another distinct 
thoughts, feelings and impressions, and can even 
transmit from his mind a mental picture which can 
be received by another mind. 

The writer, himself, has proved this. 

Leading scientific men have gone farther than 
this, and have admitted that there exists sufficient 
evidence to warrant them in believing that a tele- 
pathic communication is possible between those 
who have passed out of this life and us who are 
still on the earth-plane. 



Those Behind the Veil 81 

The Christian world ought to be profoundly 
grateful to science for lifting the doctrine of the 
"Communion of Saints" out of the region of mere 
abstraction, in which it has lain so long, into that 
domain of thought which presents it as something 
real and practical. 

If the Mind in us — handicapped as it is by its 
close association with a restricting material body — 
is, nevertheless, capable of establishing a communi- 
cation with another mind similarly circumstanced, 
what may we not predicate as to the possibilities 
of Mind when set free from the restrictions of the 
flesh? 

The mind of the Departed is functioning on a 
higher plane, and more vigorously than it did 
when they were in earth-life. Its powers have 
become enhanced. Its telepathic capabilities are 
far greater than they were. Given a person in 
the earth-life in a condition of receptiveness, and 
in affinity with one Beyond the Veil, and you can 
affix no limit to the influence which the latter may 
be able to exert upon the mind of the former. 

That makes communion between us and the 
Departed a reality — an all-important factor in our 
experience. 

We believe that our dear ones Beyond, who have 



82 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

carried with them their love and concern for us 
whom they have left behind, help us to an extent 
of which we are only partly conscious. 

A poor, bereaved heart is very sad and very 
despondent, because the shadow of death has 
fallen upon it. The inexpressible yearning for 
"the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of 
a voice that is still " is an agony to it. Suddenly, 
unexpectedly, there comes a lightening of that 
awful heart-ache, and the gleam of an indefinable 
hope breaks in upon the night of that experience. 
He knows not why it should be so; there is no 
change in his outward circumstances to account 
for it. He knows not, — and popular religious 
teaching has not helped him to know, — that that 
surcease from hopeless sorrow is the direct out- 
come of the action of that dear one Beyond the 
Veil. The vibrations of that grief and yearning 
have been felt by that discarnate spirit. The 
"deep" of a human soul "has called unto the 
deep " of a kindred human soul, and the answering 
touch has been vouchsafed. From the mental- 
self of that yearned-for one, there has been pro- 
jected, at the ordering of the Father God of con- 
solation, a thought-wave — a telepathic message of 
comfort and relief. 



Those Behind the Veil 83 

Take another experience which comes to many 
who mourn for the Departed — that sense of irrep- 
arable loss and helplessness, when the trusted 
counselor and guide of one's life is taken away. 
"Without the directing hand of that wise and 
good father of mine, how can 1 ever rightly shape 
my course in life?" asks the grieving son. 
"Without that loving and sympathetic mother, 
how can I ever be the woman I meant to be?" 
asks the timid and bereaved daughter. "Without 
that husband to bear with me the troubles and 
difficulties of life, how can ! ever face them?" 
And yet the course in life becomes rightly shaped, 
and the good and noble woman is developed, and 
the troubles and difficulties do not crush the poor 
widow. These ones have acted in relation to the 
experiences of life as those who are gone would 
have counseled and helped them to act. 

They do not realize that the father, the mother, 
the husband, or the friend has been helping them 
from the World of Spirit; that telepathic com- 
munication has been maintained; that the ones 
who loved and were concerned about us when 
they were on earth, are still loving us and are still 
concerned about us in their risen life; and that 
many of the impulses that cause us to think rightly, 



84 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

will rightly and act rightly, are impulses transmitted 
to us from the mind of those whom we love Be- 
yond the Veil. 

Oh! believe me, the Church's doctrine of the 
"Communion of Saints" can never be anything 
more to us than a bare ecclesiastical dogma, until 
we realize this. Lastly, our realization of com- 
munication between ourselves and the Departed 
will express itself in action. We shall pray for our 
dear ones Beyond the Veil. 

Why not ? Those who have lately passed over 
are as imperfect as we are; none whom we have 
known have advanced beyond the benefit of our 
prayers for them. Our prayers will help all such 
to higher life and attainments, and will cement the 
bond that links them to us. Why pray for them 
here, and omit to pray for them there} Is the 
neglect of Prayer for the Departed reasonable ? 
Is it compatible with the truest Christian in- 
stincts ? Is it not a mark that we have failed — 
utterly failed — in grasping the full import of the 
Gospel of Jesus ? Can we, if we do not pray for 
them, say we believe in the "Communion of 
Saints " ? 

How can I be in communion with any one, here 
or Beyond, unless between myself and that one 



Those Behind the Veil 85 

some kind of contact be established ? Telepathy 
and Prayer constitute that contact between us and 
the Departed. 

To talk of the "Communion of Saints," and to 
deny the possibility of vital communication be- 
tween us and those who have gone hence is an 
absurdity — a contradiction in terms. We may re- 
peat this particular clause of the Christian Creed 
all our life, and convince ourselves that we believe 
the truth enshrined in the beautiful and time- 
honored words; but we do not really believe it, 
unless we realize that the Seen and Unseen are 
allied, and that we in this world are affected by 
spiritual and mental influences that stream to us 
from those en rapport with us in Another World. 

Our Prayers for the Departed will be the out- 
come of this realization. In spite of all that a 
loveless, hopeless and comfortless theology may 
have said to the contrary, we shall pray for them. 
In the light of a better-understood Gospel than 
that which Western Christendom has taught for 
centuries, we shall plead with the Heavenly Father 
for those Behind the Veil, as earnestly and as 
naturally as we were wont to plead for them when 
they were here. 

For the sinful and lost ones in that great World 



86 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

we shall pray; knowing that in the very act we 
are placing our mind in adjustment with the mind 
of the all-saving Christ, who said He would go 
after that which was lost until He find it. 

For the faulty and undeveloped ones who have 
passed thence, we shall pray; conscious that every 
such prayer is felt by its object, and stimulates to 
nobler thought and higher aim. 

Yes, and for those saintly ones, who have bright- 
ened and blessed the lot of ourselves and of others 
here on earth, and have gone to Another World to 
continue their mission of helping and blessing; for 
them, also, we shall pray. There are heights of 
moral excellence and summits of spiritual attain- 
ment to which as yet they have not climbed. The 
prayers of those they love and have left behind will 
stimulate their spirit as they move onward to the 
goal of Perfection. 

And they — the ones Beyond for whom we pray ? 
Well, their spiritual "deep" is answering to our 
spiritual "deep." They are praying for us; and so 
a mighty wave of mental and spiritual influence is 
passing between the two worlds — from us to them, 
and from them to us. 

Conscious of this, our Religion will become an 
intenser reality to us, the Article of our Creed will 



Those Behind the Veil 87 

appear pregnant with comforting significance, and 
on that darkest of all clouds that overshadow 
human experience will appear those rainbow- 
colors, whose birthplace is in that sun of glorious 
truth, proclaimed by Jesus — "God is not the God 
of the dead, but of the living ... for all live 
unto Him." 



CHAPTER IV 

ON THE MOUNTAIN OF SPIRITUAL 
MANIFESTATION 

" Master, it is good for us to be here t " — Mark 9:5. 

The man who uttered this exclamation was 
standing, for the first time in his life, face to face 
with two of the grandest and sublimest facts that 
can be known to human consciousness. The first 
— that this world of material objects is in close 
proximity to, and interpenetrated by, another 
world, not appreciable to the organs of physical 
sense; and the other fact — that death causes no 
break in the continuity of human existence and 
mind. 

The demonstration of these facts revolutionized 
the ideas of this particular man, as similar demon- 
strations of spiritual realities are revolutionizing the 
religious notions of thousands. 

St. Peter was the person who made the exclama- 
tion — rough, honest, enthusiastic, religiously- 
minded Peter; the man who had conscientiously 
attended his synagogue, listened to the rabbis, and 



Mountain of Spiritual Manifestation 89 

believed in religion, without grasping the founda- 
tion-truth upon which religion must be built; the 
man, so like the many in our own time, who 
drowsily acquiesce in the authorized teaching con- 
cerning a Life Beyond, and then are profoundly 
surprised when it pleases God to vouchsafe to them 
any proof of the reality of that Life. 

Only, there is this great essential difference be- 
tween St. Peter and those to whom we refer. He, 
in presence of Spiritual manifestations, said — 
"Master, it is good for us to be here!"; they, 
when confronted with the facts of the Spiritual — 
say — "Nonsense! hallucination! impossibility! 
However true these sorts of things may have been 
in Bible-times (and of course, as Christians, we im- 
plicitly believe the statements of the Bible), we do 
not credit any evidence that they are happening 
flow. Spiritual manifestations are outside the area 
of our experience, and therefore all testimony con- 
cerning them can only be the outcome of delusion, 
or something worse." 

There is no inconsistency more remarkable than 
this, — that the ones who admit that their religion 
has its roots in the Spiritual, and are most con- 
vinced of the truthfulness of the Bible, are the very 
last ones to acknowledge the possibility of Psychic 



90 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

phenomena. The Christian who would be horrified 
at the bare suggestion that Moses and Elijah did not 
appear on the mountain of Transfiguration, is often 
the foremost in denouncing as incredible and ab- 
surd any testimony, however reliable, that similar 
post-mortem appearances are now taking place. 

If, in regard to these appearances, the testimony 
be so overwhelming and persistent that it is found 
to be impossible to account for it on the hypothesis 
of delusion or fraud, then numbers of Christians 
resort to that very old-fashioned expedient of attrib- 
uting anything outside the ordinary to the agency 
of Satan. 

It is refreshing, in view of this mental attitude of 
modern Christians toward Spiritual realities, to get 
back, in thought, to one who could say in presence 
of them — "Master, it is £"00^ for us to be here." 

We have mentally transported ourselves to where 
St. Peter was when he first came into contact with 
the verities of Another World. 

Picture a stately mountain, about thirty-five miles 
north of the Lake of Galilee — the loftiest and most 
imposing mountain in the land of Palestine. 
Gleaming with dazzling whiteness in the sunshine, 
its summit lies capped with a turban of snow, 
while its rough, rocky sides stand out in solemn 



Mountain of Spiritual Manifestation 91 

and severe outline, as Nature's reminders to man of 
the littleness of himself and the greatness of God. 
Truly, a suitable spot for the revelation of a Higher 
Life! Thither, the Master had led His band of 
disciples, and as they had journeyed along the hot, 
dusty road, He had spoken of His coming suffering 
and death. 

May it not have been that one of Christ's objects 
in turning the mind of His followers toward death, 
was to rivet their attention the better upon the 
magnificent contrast of life that was to be mani- 
fested ? God teaches us on the principle of con- 
trasts. 

At the foot of the great, towering mountain, 
Jesus had singled out three — Peter, James and John 
— to go with Him, and had bidden the others wait 
behind. The psychical condition of these three was 
such that they, in contradistinction to the others, 
would be able to perceive the realities of the Spirit- 
ual. The faculties of their interior spirit-body — 
clairvoyance and clairaudience — were more de- 
veloped than in the case of their companions. 

The Master and the chosen three commence the 
steep ascent. Higher and higher they climb. A 
bend in the track has taken them out of sight from 
those below. A lovely prospect bursts upon their 



92 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

view. Away toward the west, the dim outline of 
the great sea. Stretching toward the north, the 
long mountain-chain of Lebanon. Away in the 
east, just discernible in the clear atmosphere, the 
towers and buildings of the city of Damascus; 
while southward, sparkling in the sunshine, lie the 
waters of Gennesaret, into whose bosom the silver, 
threadlike stream of the upper-Jordan is emptying 
itself. Higher still! The world seems miles away, 
and the voices of the chattering crowd below are 
no longer audible. 

They have reached the spot where a demonstra- 
tion of Spiritual facts is to be vouchsafed to the 
men who are presently to be leaders in a Church, 
whose raison d'etre is to proclaim those facts to the 
world. 

A solemn hush is upon everything about them. 
No sound of earth breaks in upon the silence. The 
very atmosphere seems to be pulsating with mys- 
tery. The sense of an expected something all but 
unnerves them, as they look into each others' faces, 
and then on the silent and absorbed Jesus, as He 
stands apart, looking upward. 

What is coming? They know not; the Master 
has not told them why they have left their fellows 1 
and scaled that mountainside. 



Mountain of Spiritual Manifestation 93 

But see! a change is coming over the Person of 
the Master. An extraordinary brightness is light- 
ing His face, and His raiment is gleaming whiter 
than the snow above their heads. He is a man 
still; but oh! so glorified! A superstitious dread of 
what they call the "supernatural" takes hold of 
them. They wish the Master had not asked them 
to come with Him. They know not that that 
brightness is the electric radiance of the Spirit- 
Christ breaking through the walls of the enwrap- 
ping flesh. They know not that a day is at hand 
when a servant of that Jesus, standing before his 
accusers and murderers, shall shine with the light 
of the soul, as the Master is shining; and that men 
shall see the face of Stephen "as it had been the 
face of an angel." 

But see! two men have appeared upon the scene. 
From whence they came, and how they came, the 
three know not. They were not there a moment 
ago; they are there now. The wondering ones 
know not that the Master has exercised His Divine 
power to open the eyes of their interior spirit-body 
to behold the realities of spirit. 

The two men are conversing with Jesus, and the 
words that are uttered disclose their identity. It is 
Elijah the prophet, and Moses the great lawgiver 



94 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

who had died and been buried over fifteen hundred 
years before. 

A look of amazement and awe stamps itself on 
the faces of the friends of Jesus. A tremendous 
conviction has taken hold of them. Now they 
know that Religion, indeed, rests on the solid basis 
of fact, and not upon theory. Doubts and per- 
plexities have been swept away; a mystery has 
been elucidated; an intense assurance has been es- 
tablished. Human life has suddenly been made to 
assume to them another meaning; its unsatisfac- 
toriness has disappeared; its bugbear, Death, has 
been stripped of its horrors, and the grave is seen 
to be but the vestibule of a World of enhanced pos- 
sibilities. 

Now they know why the Master has brought 
them there. Now they know what they had never 
realized before. Death is not the extinguisher of 
man's hopes; the interrupter of his being. It 
means but transition; the introduction into fuller 
life, and the calling into activity of greater powers. 
Moses, of whom priest and rabbi have thought and 
spoken as the dead leader and moulder of their 
nation, is a living man. Oh! would that all the 
world could see and know this! What if the 
Master and these revered visitors would consent to 



Mountain of Spiritual Manifestation 95 

remain awhile in this mountain, while the three 
hasten to the Holy City to summon the teachers of 
Religion to see what they are beholding! 

Enthusiastic Peter can contain himself no longer. 
He breaks in upon the sacred discourse of the Sa- 
viour and the old-time prophet "like unto Him." 
" Master, Master, it is good for us to be here! Stay 
awhile in this hallowed spot. Let others see what 
we have seen. Let us make three tabernacles; 
one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for 
Elias." 

As he speaks, another manifestation of Spiritual 
reality is vouchsafed. Many of my readers who 
have investigated the Psychical are familiar with 
a like phenomenon. A luminous cloud over- 
shadows them. A voice is heard, speaking as if 
from out the Spiritual brightness — " This is My be- 
loved Son ; hear Him : He can tell you the secrets of 
the Beyond." 

The unearthly radiance pales; the visitants from 
Behind the Veil have gone; the demonstration of 
the Spiritual has been made. The three men look 
around, and see no man, "save Jesus only with 
themselves." 

Such was the experience of St. Peter and his com- 
panions on the mountain of Manifestation. 



96 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

It may be instructive to ask why he said it was 
good for him to be there. What great truths were 
inborne upon his mind, which were not understood 
by him before ? 

Firstly. I think that manifestation lifted his ideas 
of life after death out of the atmosphere of mere 
speculation and hope, into that of intelligent belief 
and certainty. St. Peter, up to that moment when 
he actually saw and heard departed Moses, was very 
much in the same condition as thousands of the 
Christian-folk at the present time. 

He accepted, as a part of his religion, the tradition 
of his Church, that there is a life beyond the grave; 
but it had had no influencing, no moulding effect, 
upon his thoughts and actions. His conception of 
that life was far too dim and shadowy to produce that 
result. Like the many who profess to believe in 
uninterrupted life at death, I dare say, had dear ones 
of his died, he would have done very much as they 
do. He would have thought and talked of them as 
if they were extinct, and would have buried them 
with all the gloomy paraphernalia of pagan hopeless- 
ness. Without doubt, he had believed, in common 
with his co-religionists, that the animating principle 
of a man — his soul — survives the catastrophe called 
" Death," and lives on in Another World; but as to 



Mountain of Spiritual Manifestation 97 

what the soul itself is after its departure from the 
body, and what the World of Spirit is, into which 
it enters when it leaves here, he had but the crudest 
notion. Probably, he had often thought about the 
subject. Most likely he had questioned the rabbis, 
and had only elicited from them something similar 
to what the inquiring Christian elicits from many of 
the foremost teachers of these times; viz., that the 
Life Beyond is veiled in impenetrable mystery, and 
that nobody ever has known, or ever will know, 
anything about it until he gets there. 

And so, up to the moment when Jesus demon- 
strated the reality of the Spiritual to St. Peter, the 
thought of dying had been to him what it was to 
Socrates and other grand souls — the prospect of 
"a leap in the dark." Like thousands since him, 
he believed in a resurrection; but it was a resurrec- 
tion in the far distance, that spoke nought to a 
trembling soul of intermediate unbroken life and 
uninterrupted progress. What he saw on that 
mountain of Manifestation revolutionized all his old 
ideas on the subject of Death. That horror of 
human experience was different from what he had 
imagined. 

It was not a curse; but a blessing in disguise. It 
did not chloroform a soul into suspended animation 



98 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

for an indefinite period; it was but the birth-pang to 
fuller life. 

The presence of Moses on that mount of Manifes- 
tation makes that truth perfectly clear to him. 
There he stands — the great Lawgiver — the one 
reckoned by the teachers as being the foremost 
among the honored " dead"; the man whose body 
had mouldered into dust ages ago! There he stands 
— that departed Moses; not a shadowy vapor; not 
a nebulous luminosity; not a phantom of the im- 
agination; but a man, with the shape of a man, the 
voice of a man, and the thoughts and reasoning 
powers of a man! " Behold there talked with Him 
two men." 

From that moment, the World of Spirit, and the 
unbroken continuance of life on the part of those 
who are ushered into it by death, became living 
realities to St. Peter. 

Grasping the truth which was later on to be 
embodied in the words of a brother-apostle — 
"There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual 
body "—St. Peter realized the truth which the world 
to-day is being awakened to realize, that our 
essential self is not a bodiless, naked entity; but a 
spirit enclosed in a spiritual organism; and that 
Death, which strips us of the physical, leaves us 



Mountain of Spiritual Manifestation 99 

with a spiritual enwrapment which acquires ex- 
tended powers by its emancipation from the flesh. 
Years after St. Peter had had this experience on the 
mount, he could write as calmly and fearlessly 
about dying as if he were only proposing to dis- 
card an unneeded garment — '■' Shortly," wrote he, 
" I must put off this my tabernacle." 

Those after-words of the Apostle reveal to us the 
primary reason for that exclamation — " Master, it is 
good for us to be here." 

Further, St. Peter learned another great truth 
concerning life Behind the Veil, viz., that the tone 
and disposition of a person's mind before death 
characterizes his mental condition after death. 
The act of dying does not remodel us as a being 
with a wholly new set of thoughts, ideas, feelings, 
emotions and aspirations. The one who has not 
cultivated, in this life, the mental and spiritual 
parts of his being, will not, as some have sup- 
posed, find, in the Spiritual World, those parts of 
him to be vigorous. In that World where mind 
is predominant, for a while, at least, he will be 
unadapted to his environment. The earth-life 
handicapping of himself will have placed him at 
a disadvantage. 

The person who has attached little or no im- 



ILefC 



ioo Thoughts of the Spiritual 

portance as to the formation of character; who 
has imagined that a death-bed repentance and the 
transference to Another World will suddenly equip 
him for the perfection and blissfulness of Heaven, 
will find out his mistake. Whatever condition of 
future Salvation that postponed repentance may 
initiate him into, it does not transform him into 
an individual whose character is developed as 
soon as he crosses the frontier-line of the Spirit- 
ual. That man, too, will have handicapped him- 
self. 

Conversely, the one who has rightly disposed 
the mind, during earth-life; who has courted 
uplifting thoughts, cherished Christlike feelings 
and developed noble traits of character, will carry 
those acquirements with him as he passes hence. 

In other words, we are not one kind of being 
here, and an altogether different kind of being 
there. The act of dying effects no break in the 
continuity of our existence, nor does it effect any 
break in the continuity of thought and character. 
That fact was made very clear to St. Peter and 
his friends on that mountain of Manifestation. 
The mind of Moses on the Spirit-plane, who was 
heard conversing with the Saviour, was shown to 
be the same mind that had energized in the man 



Mountain of Spiritual Manifestation 101 

when he was on earth. To whatever extent his 
sojourn of fifteen hundred years in the Spiritual 
World had developed the capabilities of his mind, 
it had not altered its disposition. 

He was still, as a discarnate man, thinking on 
the lines he had thought as an incarnate man. 
When in that land of Moab, "according to the 
word of the Lord," that grand old emancipator of 
Israel finished his earth-life's work, and passed to 
the Beyond, he did not leave his thoughts, his 
ideas, and his hopes behind him. Centuries of 
spiritual experience had not eradicated those 
thoughts and ideas. 

In the earth-life, his mind had been concentrated 
upon the idea of sacrifice and death. He it was 
who had formulated and established the system of 
Levitical worship. In the spirit-life, his thoughts 
were still in the same groove, and with clearer per- 
ceptions of Divine truth, he was thinking of the 
same things. St. Luke, in recording the incident 
of that conversation on the mountain, states, that 
Moses "spake of His (the Saviour's) decease which 
He should accomplish at Jerusalem." 

It was this truth in regard to the continuity of 
mind that flashed itself upon the consciousness 
of the Apostle on this occasion. He felt that 



102 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

henceforth life on earth would bear a different 
and a more important significance. What he 
would be after death would correspond exactly 
with what he was making himself to be before 
death. The disposition he was now giving to 
his mind and character would be the disposition 
that both would have Beyond the Veil. From 
that conversation between Moses and the Christ, 
he could gather that Death would bring no 
sudden mental and moral transformation; no 
change of nature, no instant redirection to the 
mind and will; it would but change environment. 
"Master," he exclaims, "it is well I know this; 
well for my earnestness in that task of cultivating 
my mind and character now while I am in this 
lower-life. It is good for us to be here! " 

Yes, and it is good for us who are living in 
an age when Spiritual verities are being dem- 
onstrated in our midst, to grasp the great les- 
sons which our Father-God, in His goodness, is 
imparting. 

Many, since Moses on that mountain of Mani- 
festation appeared to astonished disciples, have 
manifested, and are still manifesting, themselves 
from the World of Spirit to us who are here. 

To any reader who doubts this assertion, we 



Mountain of Spiritual Manifestation 1 03 

say — "Open your mind to conviction; do not let 
the dreary agnosticism which has characterized 
so much of the religious teaching of the past, 
cause you to close your eyes to the wonderful 
revealments of the present. Study the published 
reports of men who have investigated the 
phenomena of the Psychic (I mean the admis- 
sions of the men of Science), until you shall be 
compelled to concede, in opposition to all you 
have been taught, that " there are more things in 
heaven and earth than you had hitherto dreamed 
of in your philosophy." 

To those earnest, but narrow-minded and illog- 
ical ones, who ascribe all Psychical phenomena — 
all proof that man possesses a death-surviving soul 
— to the agency of a Satan, supposed to be as 
powerful as, or even more powerful than, the 
God Himself, we say — "Nonsense — do not be 
silly! How can the devil further his ends by 
concocting spiritual manifestations which convince 
man, first, that 'life is real; life is earnest,' and 
next, that ' the grave is not its goal ' ? " 

Why, in the name of common sense, account 
that incident on the mountain of Spiritual Manifes- 
tation, a blessed revealment of God; and in the 
next breath, account later manifestations, declaring 



104 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

the same mighty truths of uninterrupted life and 
character, as machinations of the Evil One! 

It was good for St. Peter, who saw a departed 
one after death, and it is good for thousands who 
are now living, and have had a similar experience 
— to know that Death denudes us of nought but 
our physical encasement; that it is but the birth- 
pang that ushers us into fuller being, and the 
God-appointed gateway through which we pass to 
greater possibilities. 

Yes, and it was good for St. Peter, and it is good 
for us also to know that the eternal moral laws of 
God are inviolable; that a man must reap in his 
life Beyond what he has sown in his life on earth; 
that the bent and disposition given to the mind 
here, will be its bent and disposition after death. 

It is good for us to know and realize this, because 
it will lead us so to think, so to feel, and so to act 
in this Infant-school of our experience, that when 
God shall say — "Come up higher!" we may pass 
easily on to our perfection and salvation. 



CHAPTER V 

A SPIRITUAL WORLD AND THE SPIRITUAL 
FACULTIES TO DISCERN IT 

" Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the 
heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them 
that love Him ; but God hath revealed them unto us by His 
Spirit." — i Cor. 2:9, 10. 

St. Paul in these words appears, at first sight, to 
be making two statements which are absolutely 
contradictory. He affirms that the things prepared 
by God for them that love Him have not been seen, 
nor heard, nor imagined by man; and in the next 
breath asserts that they have been revealed unto 
himself and others. Our task will be to see if these 
apparently conflicting utterances can be reconciled, 
and shown to be unopposed sides of a great truth. 

The words appear in one of the Apostle's Letters 
to a local Christian Church of his time. He is 
writing about Spiritual realities, and is supporting 
his case by an appeal to Old Testament Scriptures. 
As he sits with the pen in his hand, the words of 
the old-time prophet come to his mind (Isa. 64: 4). 
They exactly fit in with the subject about which he 



106 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

is thinking; he quotes them, not word for word as 
they stand, but as his memory serves him. He has 
grasped the truth underlying the prophet's thought; 
the actual verbal expression of that thought is of 
little moment. Isaiah has voiced a fact which his 
own spirit acknowledges to be true. The Chris- 
tian Church shall know that the teacher of the 
Present is in agreement with the Seer of the Past in 
regard to Spiritual realities. The context of the 
words shows what was the trend of St. Paul's 
thought. His mind is centred on a living, risen 
Christ. "I determined not to know anything 
among you, save Jesus Christ; and that One 
(marvel of marvels!) crucified!" "None of the 
princes of this world," he goes on to say, "knew 
who He was, or what His magnificent mission was; 
for had they known it, they would not have cruci- 
fied the Lord of glory." In other words, St. Paul 
was affirming that the ones who had obtained what 
men account the "good things" of this world — 
position and riches — had lived only for the Mate- 
rial, and because of that, had lacked a perception 
of the Spiritual. In their midst had been the Lord 
of the Spiritual; but they had not recognized Him. 
When He became incarnate, the communication 
between the Spiritual World and this world, closed 



A Spiritual World 107 

for centuries, had been reopened. That was a fact 
unrealized by them. The accounts of the Spiritual 
manifestations which tracked the course of the 
Lord of Spirit from Bethlehem to Olivet, as He 
moved among men as the Logos "made flesh," 
were not credited. Men had concentrated their 
mental gaze only on things pertaining to the Phys- 
ical, and, in consequence, could perceive nought 
else. 

Looking out upon things only with the organs 
of material sense, an environing world of Spiritual 
reality was not perceived, and the Lord of that 
World — the Spiritual Christ — was regarded only 
as a man whom political and religious expediency 
demanded should be crucified. 

St. Paul, in writing — "Eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of 
man, the things which God hath prepared for them 
that love Him " — was but proclaiming an unalter- 
able principle in regard to God's order of things — 
viz., that the one who fixes his gaze only on the 
Physical, thereby renders himself unable to perceive 
the facts of the Spiritual. 

The men of Science in the past admitted nothing 
within the horizon of their thought except the 
Physical, and thereby they lost all vision of the 



108 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

Spiritual. The scientific men of to-day, on the 
other hand, are less confident that the Physical can 
account for all the mysteries of being, and upon 
them, in consequence, the realities of the Spiritual 
are beginning to dawn. Spirit alone can perceive 
Spirit. Spiritual faculties within us must be quick- 
ened into activity before we can appreciate Spiritual 
realities. The Apostle was teaching this truth when 
he said — "God hath revealed the prepared-things 
of a Spiritual World unto us by His Spirit.'" In the 
very nature of things, that which pertains to the 
Spiritual within and without us, will not be per- 
ceived by the one whose mind is only functioning 
on the plane of the Physical. To discern the real- 
ities of a Spiritual World, there must be the exer- 
cise within a man of spiritual powers and faculties 
related to that World. 

It may seem to some a startling statement, but it 
is, nevertheless, true, that every one of us at the 
present time is living in two Worlds — the Physical 
and the Spiritual. The old-fashioned religious 
notion was, that we live now only in the Physical 
World, and that not until after death can we pos- 
sibly be brought into contact with the Spiritual 
World. In accordance with this idea, the World of 
Spirit was viewed as a locality removed from us a 



A Spiritual World 109 

long distance; to which locality our spirit departs 
when detached from the earthly body. To die, 
therefore, was regarded as passing altogether be- 
yond the range of communication with any on the 
plane of the Material. 

Modern investigation of Psychic facts has com- 
pletely altered this conception. It has demonstrated 
the truth, so clearly taught in the Bible, that the 
Physical is interpenetrated by the Spiritual; that a 
person has not to wait for death before he can enter 
upon Spiritual experience; that that World is 
within him already; surrounding, touching and 
influencing him. Every one of us is a spirit, and 
every spirit is contained within a spiritual organiza- 
tion — a spirit-body; which imparts personality, and 
to the spirit the power of expressing itself. 

There are many who do not understand these 
great and important facts, and, in consequence, 
hold an altogether wrong idea of themselves, and of 
their life here and hereafter. It is impossible for 
any one to estimate rightly the possibilities of his 
being, and to adjust himself for the attainment of 
those possibilities, until he shall have realized that 
he, now living in a World that is physical, is, never- 
theless, also living at the same time in a World that 
is spiritual. He must realize that he now is, not 



1 i o Thoughts of the Spiritual 

one day shall be, a spirit; and now is living in a 
spiritual environment. He must be conscious that 
however much the material side of him may adapt 
him to relationship to the Physical, not less adapted 
is he by the spirit part of him to relationship with 
the Spiritual. The perception of this truth will 
completely remodel his ideas concerning dying. 
He will not suppose that Death will create him a 
spiritual being, and bring him for the first time into 
relationship with a Spiritual World. He will know 
that after death he will be no more than he has been 
while living on the earth — a spirit: a spirit — it is 
true— whose faculties and powers have not been 
fully developed, because of the restrictions of the 
flesh ; but still a spirit. He will know that the act 
of dying does not transport him to a World of 
Spirit far off and hitherto unapproachable; but that 
it simply rids him of physical conditions whereby 
there is brought about the completer opening of the 
faculties of his interior spirit-body better to perceive 
the realities of that Spiritual World in which he has 
been living ever since he was born. 

Let a person be thus convinced that the World of 
Spirit is pressing upon him while he is in this life; 
let him, moreover, be convinced that Death cannot 
touch him, but can only lessen his relationship to 



A Spiritual World in 

the Physical, and intensify his relationship to the 
Spiritual, and the great question he will set himself 
to answer will be this — " What will be my expe- 
riences in that great World which is interpenetrating 
me and all around me, when divested of this earthly 
body, and with the faculties of my spirit-body al- 
lowed free play— I shall have become in more per- 
fect adjustment with it ? " 

It is a reasonable question, surely. The agnostic 
tone assumed by many of the religious teachers in 
respect to it is very disappointing to thousands of 
earnest and inquiring souls. 

Can we, then, who are now passing through the 
experiences and discipline of the Physical, form any 
definite idea as to what will be our experiences 
when we shall be fully en rapport with the Spir- 
itual ? 

We think it is possible, and the words of Isaiah, 
quoted by St. Paul, seem to give direction to our 
thoughts. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
neither have entered into the heart of man." 

Not seen! not heard 1 not perceived! The words 
sound very disappointing to a soul awakened to the 
realities of spirit. They appear to justify our Ag- 
nostic brethren who tell us it is impossible to know 
anything about the Hereafter. 



1 1 2 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

But stay! Look at the passage more carefully. 
Beneath the surface of its negative form, there lies a 
wealth of positive significance. 

In the first place, of whom did Prophet and Apos- 
tle say — " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
have entered into the heart of man " ? Not of all 
men and women living in the earth-life. "God 
hath revealed the things prepared for them that love 
Him unto us," writes the Apostle. Manifestly, 
then, if this latter statement be true, it is possible 
for some, at least, to have a knowledge of what 
constitutes Spiritual realities. If it be not possible in 
this world to possess that knowledge, then the 
Apostle's statement that God " hath revealed them " 
is not true. 

What the Seers of the two different Dispensations 
of Religion asserted was this, that the physical eyes 
and ears of man cannot see and hear the wonders 
and realities of the Spiritual, though he be living in 
the midst of them. His physical organs of sight 
and hearing are too coarse to appreciate the finer 
sights and sounds of the universe of Spirit. Spirit- 
ual presences may be close beside us, and spirit 
voices may be speaking to us, but, like Balaam, we 
shall see and hear nothing until the organs of our in- 
terior spirit-body have been opened. 



A Spiritual World 113 

The man, too, who only exercises his mind in re- 
gard to mundane objects and concerns, will find him- 
self unable to form any true ideas of the Spiritual. 
The twin parts of his mental constitution — his supra- 
liminal mind which is the medium by which he 
comes into relationship with Physical things, and 
his subliminal mind by which contact with things 
spiritual is established — are not fully functioning. 
The supra-liminal powers of his mind may be very 
active, while its subliminal powers may be wholly 
inoperative. In such a case there will be no per- 
ception of the Spiritual. Not only in respect to his 
physical body, but also as regards his mind, the 
man will be "of the earth, earthy "; he will be in- 
sensible to the Spiritual. Instead of being properly 
balanced, and in true relationship to the two worlds 
to which he is allied, he will have adjusted himself 
only to one. 

It is this which constitutes the difference between 
a religious and a non-religious life. 

There are those living in this world, the faculties 
of whose interior spiritual organization are so quick- 
ened and developed, as to enable them to perceive 
the realities and to receive the influences of the 
Spiritual World, in a way that others cannot. 
Spiritual sights and sounds, invisible and inaudible 



ii4 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

to others whose inner senses are unopened, are visi- 
ble and audible to them. They are what the Bible 
calls the " Seers " — the ones who see in their environ- 
ment that which physical eyes cannot discern, and 
receive the etheric vibrations of spiritual sound 
which are inappreciable to physical ears. 

St. Paul himself was an instance of the opening 
of the faculties of the interior spirit-body. He 
describes in 2 Corinthians 12, an experience which 
befell him before he departed this life. He was 
"caught up " (so he puts it) into Paradise, into the 
third sphere of it, and heard things incapable of be- 
ing expressed in human language. In other words, 
by the withdrawal of the obstructing influence of 
the flesh (probably when his physical body was in a 
condition of sleep or trance), the latent powers of 
his spirit were left so unrestricted as to cause him to 
come at once into conscious contact with the reali- 
ties of a World spiritual. 

It was with the eyes and ears of an organization 
finer than that of the Physical that St. Paul beheld 
and heard the wonders of Paradise. 

The sense of disappointment, then, that seems, at 
first, to lurk in his words — " Eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, neither have entered into the heart" — 
disappears, as we realize that he was but referring 



A Spiritual World uj 

to the physical eye and ear, and to that department 
of mental activity which takes cognizance of the 
Physical. Within us, pertaining to the ethereal or- 
ganization which clothes our spirit, there are eyes 
and ears and a department of mind which can, even 
under the limitations of terrestrial existence, cognize 
the Spiritual. 

It is because these interior faculties are more de- 
veloped in some men than in others, that certain 
ones, irrespective of birth and learning, were chosen 
by God to be Seers and Prophets and Apostles. 
By them, rather than by the priests of Religion, 
has man's belief in Spiritual verities been estab- 
lished. 

We spoke of the positive significance of St. Paul's 
quotation. 

In declaring that the physical eye and ear and 
mind are incapable of perceiving the realities of the 
Spiritual, the words imply that there are, connected 
with that Other World, things possible of being seen, 
heard and understood. The things which God 
has prepared are visible, audible and understanda- 
ble, although not through the mediumship of coarse 
physical organs. When we say a blind man can- 
not see an object, or a deaf man hear a sound, 
we imply the reality of the object and the sound. 



u6 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

The passage we are considering implies that the 
World of Spirit is a World of sight, sound and in- 
telligence, and not a region of abstraction. 

Thank God for that! That which constitutes the 
real horror of dying on the part of many, even 
Christians, is the thought that our conscious, sensi- 
tive self will then pass into a condition devoid of 
all which characterizes existence here. Let a dying 
one be convinced that Death will not transport him 
to a distant Realm of which no knowledge is pos- 
sessed, but will only adapt him more perfectly for 
a spiritual environment in which he has all along 
been living; let him but realize that sight and sound 
and mind are intenser realities on the other side of 
the Veil than on this side, and the dread of death 
will vanish. Like the psychic St. Paul, the thought 
of departure from earth life will but wring from 
him those words so pregnant with confident expec- 
tation — "O, Death! where is thy sting 1" 

(a) In the Spiritual World there are things to be 
seen. 

It is a World of objective as well as subjective 
reality. The things that exist here are the counter- 
parts of spiritual things that exist there; the pre- 
sentment of the latter in coarser form on a lower 
plane of being. 



A Spiritual World 117 

Many do not grasp this, and consequently regard 
everything pertaining to the Spiritual as unnatural. 

Nothing is unnatural in the Universe of God. 
There are myriads of sights and sounds that trans- 
cend man's imagination; but they are not unnatural. 

One of the greatest astonishments to us, when 
we shall pass from the surroundings of earth, will 
be to discover that we are in a World where all is 
very real and very natural. The prevailing idea of 
Life Beyond is that it corresponds to nothing of 
which we have experience in this life. Some have 
a vague idea of the realm of spirit as a vast, misty 
space, without form, without beauty and color, 
and without objects, save but for those bodiless 
and unattractive souls who are supposed to flit 
about there until the time shall come for God to 
restore to them the right to be human once more. 

Is it any wonder, we ask, that persons, with 
such indefinite notions as these, shudder at the 
mere thought of dying ? Is there a thoughtful man 
to be found, who would not prefer to be a destitute 
and homeless tramp on this beautiful earth, rather 
than be exiled to such a life as that ? 

Depend upon it, if we would turn the thoughts 
of men, who can appreciate the beauties of Physical 
Nature, to a World higher than the Physical, we 



n8 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

must point them to a Universe containing its reali- 
ties of sight and sound. 

The physical objects we behold are the counter- 
parts, we have said, of Spiritual things. We see 
with our physical eyes a material object, e.g., a 
human body, or a flower. What does it mean to 
us ? Do we regard it only as so many particles 
of inert matter, marvelously grouped and co-ordi- 
nated by Divine skill, and interpenetrated by a 
mysterious something called "life"? 

If we only regard the body, or the flower, in this 
way, we have not understood the first principle 
of material existence. That body and that flower 
are physical representations of what exists on a 
spiritual plane. The earthly body is a likeness of 
a spiritual body, and the flower a likeness of a 
spiritual flower. The originals of both are not to 
be looked for in the Physical but the Spiritual. The 
touch which is given to lifeless matter, moulding 
it into design and beauty, is a touch of Spirit, 
working in obedience to God's great law of Corre- 
spondence. If in the World of Spirit there were no 
bodies, no flowers, no landscapes and no variety 
and beauty, there would be no such things on the 
plane of Matter. The objects which we see around 
us here have their prototypes elsewhere, and be- 



A Spiritual World 119 

cause they are but representations impressed on 
changeful Matter, they will not last. St. Paul ex- 
pressed that truth, when he wrote — "The things 
which are seen are temporal; but the things not 
seen, aionial." 

Further, the sights of the Spiritual World sur- 
pass in reality their counterparts in the Physical. 
They were to be expected. The representation of 
any object lacks the reality which the object itself 
possesses. The written or printed characters that 
represent and convey a man's thought have not the 
reality that the thoughts themselves have. The 
printed book is a reality, and the thought expressed 
by the arrangement of the words is a reality; but 
the mind from which the thought and the arrange- 
ment have come is a far greater reality. So in 
regard to Spiritual realities. Thought is a creative 
power. It has filled a Spiritual Universe with ob- 
jects that can be seen. Those Thought-creations 
have by the power of God been printed on the 
page of the Material. Physical objects are realities; 
but not so great realities as their prototypes, the 
Spiritual. The objects of sight, open to the spirit's 
vision, are grander and more beautiful than any 
earthly representation of them can ever be. 

Was that not the thought of St. Paul expressed 



120 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

in the words — "Eye hath not seen . . . the 
things which God hath prepared" ? 

The Seers, the eyes of whose spirit-body had 
been quickened, beheld spiritual objects resembling 
those with which they were normally familiar, but 
so much grander as to call forth expressions of 
amazement from them. 

Some of us have stood at death-beds, and seen 
a look of unutterable wonder pass over the pale, 
dying face, and heard the words—" How marvel- 
ous! How beautiful! " 

Did we realize that the eyes of a spirit-body 
were opening to see the wonders of the Spir- 
itual ? 

(b) In the Spiritual World there are sounds to 
be heard. 

We can only touch the fringe of this phase of 
our subject. Take music — that which is produced 
by the voice and also by mechanical agency. Its 
influence upon the higher part of man is marvelous. 
It can stir and thrill and uplift him. It can 
solemnize him and incite him to think. It can 
move him to activity or restfulness; to laughter 
or tears; to thoughtlessness or devotion. It can 
drag out from the innermost recesses of his brain, 
memories and regrets that have lain there undis- 



A Spiritual World 121 

turbed for half a century. It can stimulate his 
earth-bound spirit to rise above the sordid things 
of earth to the very throne of the Infinite. 

And, pray, what is this mighty moving power — 
this music? Ask the one who has no perception 
of things Spiritual. He will tell you it is only an 
arrangement of muscles and tissues, whereby 
certain vocal chords, assisted by a little piece of 
red flesh in the mouth, can, by contraction and 
relaxation, so manipulate the air as to cause it to 
produce harmonious sounds. Or, music is only a 
mechanical arrangement of metal, wood and 
string, whereby certain vibrations are made on 
the atmosphere, disposed in such a way as to 
please the ear. 

We ask — Is that all the account you can give of 
music — so mighty, so grand, so unfathomable in its 
influence, even as we hear it here ? 

Ask the poet (and no man is a poet unless he be 
a Seer) what he has to say about it. Ask the Bible 
what it has to say on the subject. Will they not 
both tell us that the source of true music is in the 
World of Spirit; that there is a "music of the 
spheres"; that the sweetest concords of sound 
are but the echoes from Beyond; and that the 
great masters of music are those the ears of whose 



122 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

spiritual organization have been opened to hear the 
harmonies of the Spiritual World. 

When St. Paul had the experience to which 
we have alluded, did he not hear "unspeakable 
words," which earthly language could not ex- 
press ? 

How many a little, unimaginative child — whose 
soul is whiter and purer than ours, has, in the act 
of dying, told us that he hears the sound of beauti- 
ful music 1 You know, of course, what it means. 
It means that the spirit-body, of that little unsullied 
one, even before it has left the earthly tenement, 
has become so quickened that the spiritual ears 
have caught the sound of angel-voices, unheard 
by the organs of physical sense. Yes, " Ear hath 
not heard," — that is, this coarse, physical ear hath 
not heard — "the things which God hath pre- 
pared"; because the things to be heard are of 
the Spiritual; and the physical ear is too dull and 
unattuned to register the etheric vibrations of spirit- 
ual sound. 

(c) In the Spiritual World there is that which 
can engage the heart — the affections — of man. 

"Neither have entered into the heart," writes St. 
Paul. That which, in the World of Spirit, engages 
the affections of man (like the sights and sounds 



A Spiritual World 123 

of that World) are prototypes. We have the 
counterpart, the correspondence, the representa- 
tion on the lower plane of earth-life. 

What engages the heart of a good man here? 

A variety of things exist to which he may direct 
his affections. 

There is love; that mysterious, absorbing and 
dominating power, which is engendered by affinity 
between soul and soul; branching off into husband's, 
wife's, father's, mother's, child's, sweetheart's, and 
friend's love. They are all good, these loves. 
They are all from the God who Himself is Love. 
They are all meant to live on. The prototypes of 
them all exist in the Spiritual. Not one of them is 
dissociated therefrom. Only there we shall find 
the intense reality of Love: here, we only get it 
energizing on the lower level of the Material. 
Love which constitutes the Essence of God, and 
forms the very atmosphere of heaven, takes hold 
of the heart of mortals, but its tone is lowered as 
the Physical dominates it. Behind the Veil, the 
Physical will have been left behind, and the being 
of love will be able to soar to heights of soul-ex- 
perience but feebly dreamed of here. 

There are other things that engage the hearts of 
men here; science, art, social intercourse and so 



124 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

on. The originals of these are in the Spiritual. 
Science and art are at a disadvantage on the 
plane of the Physical. We have made of late 
years enormous strides in the direction of knowl- 
edge; but how much do we know ? Not one- 
thousandth part of what we do not know. Take 
but one example — that in regard to Mind. What 
do we know about it? Very little, in spite of all 
the lately ascertained facts in respect to Telepathy 
and Thought-forms. In the Spirit-World, where 
Mind is predominant, its nature and functionings 
are as well understood as physical anatomy is un- 
derstood here. 

Social intercourse, too. It is a poor sort of 
thing here, in comparison with what it is there. 
Speaking generally, here it lacks the ingredient 
which is most important — the converse of soul 
with soul. The true home of social intercourse 
is the Spiritual, where soul can touch soul, and 
mind touch mind, without the interposing of the 
Physical which veils the one, and often obstructs 
the other. 

So then, we gather up the thoughts upon which 
we have dwelt, and focus them. 

The Spiritual World is not a World of mistiness 
and unreality. Those who, like Samuel and Moses 



A Spiritual World 125 

and Jesus and the "fellow-servant" of St. John, 
have after death revealed themselves to those whom 
they have left behind on earth, have told us that it 
is this world of ours which seems so misty and un- 
real from the plane of Spirit; and that the physical 
objects which seem to us so substantial, to spirit- 
eyes appear shadowy and nebulous. 

No, the Spiritual World is a World of reality. 
Many of its sights will appear familiar to us, be- 
cause we have seen their representations here; but 
the sights will be grander and more beautiful. Many 
of its sounds will not appear novel, because we have 
caught their echoes on earth; but the sounds will be 
more enchanting. 

Many of the things that will engage the heart will 
only be the higher manifestation of what has courted 
our affections on earth. There, we shall still love; 
but more exaltedly and purely. There, we shall 
still seek after knowledge; but the horizon of 
knowledge will be infinitely expanded. There we 
shall still mingle with our fellows in social inter- 
course; but the class-distinctions, the insipidness, 
the conventionality and the soullessness of much of 
the social life on earth will have disappeared. So 
have said the poets and seers of all ages. 



126 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

" A little child to a mother said — 
' What shall we do when we are dead ? 
Shall we all play harps and all sing psalms, 
And wear white robes and carry palms ? 
Are there no flowers in the golden street ? 
No grassy glades for the tired feet ? 
No singing birds in the fadeless bowers ? 
Is it such a different world from ours ? ' 
Then the mother turned aside to pray, 
And she thought she heard an angel say — 
• Heaven is but a perfect earth, 
As the world was at its birth, 
All that Love in life should love, 
Will be found again above.' 
The mother answered — ' The realm of rest 
Is all we love, and would love the best ; 
The best of all of the things of Time, 
Are lent to pass to that cloudless clime. 
Its sweetest songs, and its fairest flowers, 
Its hearts and homes are akin to ours ; 
Thus heaven is holding for you and me 
All that we wish that this world would be.' 
Then the mother heard its evening prayers, 
And talked with an angel unawares — 
Heaven is but a perfect earth, 
As the world was at its birth ; 
All that Love in life should love 
Will be found again above ! " 

— H. L. D'Arcv Jaxone. 

Lastly, we are confronted with the fact that the 
sights and sounds of the Spiritual World — because 
that World is interpenetrating the Physical, and we 
possess an interior spiritual organization — may at 



A Spiritual World 127 

times be seen and heard by persons who are still 
living under the conditions of the Physical. By the 
ante-mortem quickening and opening of the faculties 
of that ethereal body in which the human spirit is 
encased, numbers of persons, in all ages, have been 
able to cognize the realities of Spirit-life. Clair- 
voyance is but the premature development of the 
spirit's power of vision, and clairaudience is but the 
premature development of its power of hearing. 
In the case of the many the development comes 
only with the release of the " inner-man" from his 
obscuring physical encasement. In the case of 
some it is otherwise. The development and open- 
ing has taken place before death. The existence 
of these powers of clairvoyance and clairaudience 
is acknowledged by Science, and the fact is 
revolutionizing man's conception of himself, and 
stamping the Bible-records with the imprimatur of 
truth. 

" The interior eyes and ears of men were opened 
to perceive Spiritual realities," says the Bible; and 
the one who has only adjusted himself to one 
world and not to two says — 'Nonsense! it is 
impossible!" " The interior eyes and ears of some 
can, assuredly, see and hear what the physical eyes 
and ears cannot," says the Science of to-day. " It 



128 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

is all nonsense, I tell you, or a delusion of the 
devil," says the old-fashioned Christian. "The 
young man with Elisha, and Balaam going where 
he ought not to have gone, and Stephen, the 
martyr, and Saul, the persecutor, and a host of 
others, of course, saw and heard that which no 
physical organs could see and hear. But all hap- 
pened in the Bible-times. Such things do not 
happen now. Clairvoyance and clairaudience! — 
nothing in the world would induce me to believe in 
such powers." 

And still the unfoldment of Spiritual realities goes 
on, in spite of the materially-minded ones and the 
illogical Christians. Again, as in the past, the com- 
munication between us and those on the Other Side 
has been re-established. A mighty tide of Spiritual 
Thought and Influence has set toward us. It 
gathers volume as it rolls. It is sweeping away 
the crude and misty notions of the past centuries of 
unenlightenment. It is clearing away from Chris- 
tian truth those unutterable horrors that have clung 
about the thought of Death and Judgment, and 
it is forcing in upon the minds of men the con- 
viction that they, even amid the passing shadows 
of the Temporal, are spirits whose goal is the 
Eternal. 



CHAPTER VI 

CHRIST'S IMPARTATION OF THE HIGHER 
SPIRIT-LIFE 

" Jesus said unto them — Verily, verily I say unto you — Except ye 
eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have 
not life in you. Whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My 
blood hath life seonial, and I will advance him at the last 
day."— John 6 : 53, 54. 

This utterance of our Saviour Christ, although it 
presents no difficulty to those who have grasped 
the truth concerning the communication to us of 
powers and influences from the World of Spirit, 
presents many difficulties to those who have not 
grasped that truth. The Jews to whom the words 
were spoken, interpreted them in a material sense, 
and said — " How can this man give us His flesh to 
eat ? " 

Many of the truth-seekers who had hitherto been 
looking to Jesus as an Expounder of truth, lost 
their newly-acquired confidence in Him, and ex- 
claimed — "This is an hard saying; who can hear 
it?" 

So perplexing and so apparently irrational was 
the Master's utterance to minds not spiritually 



130 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

attuned, that even some of His disciples " went 
back, and walked no more with Him." And yet 
had men but kept their ears open, and listened to 
what He said in another part of the same discourse, 
the difficulties would have disappeared. These 
words of the Saviour have not been understood in 
later times. Men have wrangled and squabbled 
over them all down the centuries. Those who 
thought they meant one thing, have banned and 
excommunicated, persecuted and hounded to death, 
those who thought otherwise. 

"The Christ taught Transubstantiation " — says 
the Romanist. 

"No such thing!" rejoins the Lutheran— " the 
truth lies in Consubstantiation." 

" Both of you are wrong," interposes the Angli- 
can, — "The doctrine of the 'Real Presence' is 
what He meant." 

And all the while, the great Christian world has 
failed to realize a grand Spiritual fact, because it has 
been mystified and bewildered by the controversies 
of the Schools. May it be that we, who are living 
in the light of a renewed revelation of Spiritual 
realities as vouchsafed to this age, may, perhaps, be 
better able, than were some in the past, to grasp 
the import of the Master's words ? 



The Higher Spirit-Life 131 

He was speaking about His Impartation to men 
of the higher spirit-life. Shall we consider the sub- 
ject under two aspects ? viz. — The character of that 
life; and Christ's impartation of it to us. 

I. The character of higher spirit-life. 

That which differentiates the old idea of spirit- 
life, or experience, from the idea that is now gain- 
ing acceptance, is, that variety, rather than uni- 
formity, characterizes it. The old-fashioned notion 
was that human souls must be grouped in one of 
two classes, and that, after death, they would find 
themselves in one of two places, or conditions. 
Men and women, it was supposed, are either good 
or bad, and after this life, proceed straightway to 
heaven or hell. It was imagined that the life and 
experience of every good person who went to 
heaven would be exactly that of all the other good 
ones who go there; while the life and experience of 
every bad person who was consigned to hell, would 
be the counterpart of the lot of all the lost ones. It 
never seemed to strike the supporters of this doc- 
trine that it is impossible to draw a dividing line 
between those whom we label "good "and "bad"; 
that between these two classes lie an infinite num- 
ber of characters who are neither good enough for 
heaven, nor bad enough for hell. 



13 2 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

That old idea alluded to is fast losing currency, 
and we are beginning to realize that there are as 
many phases, degrees and varieties of life Spiritual 
as there are of life physical. 

There is physical life in the protoplasm and the 
protophyte, but it is lower in degree than the life in 
the fish and the flowering plant. Again, there is 
physical life in the highly-organized animal and 
man, but it is in more developed form than the life 
of those physical organisms that range between 
man and the fishes and the plants. 

There is the correspondence to this on the Spir- 
itual plane. We believe, in regard to human souls, 
that there are many degrees of spirit-life. There 
are souls, incarnate and discarnate, whose life is 
analogous to the life in the protoplasm or the proto- 
phyte. It is of a low order; it possesses potentiali- 
ties; but it is unevolved. 

They are the ones whose horizon of thought and 
desire, in this world, is bounded by the Physical; 
the ones who, when they pass into the Spirit- 
World, find themselves in a condition of spiritual 
non-development, because in the earth-life the spir- 
itual side of them had not been cultivated. They 
are in non-adjustment with their environment there. 

Again, there are men and women, both here and 



The Higher Spirit-Life 133 

Beyond, whose spirit-life has reached a certain 
stage of advancement; whose spirit-powers, al- 
though not fully energizing, are exhibiting the 
signs of expanding life. A mysterious, quickening 
touch from the Divine has been received; they have 
been "born avmdsv" (from a source above), as 
Jesus expressed it to Nicodemus; and that touch is 
the precursor of higher spirit-life. 

Further, there are many in earth-life and on the 
Other Side, whose spirit-life has reached the point 
of high development; whose interior senses have 
been opened; to whom God and spiritual things 
are intense realities; who "live and move and 
have their being" on the highest plane of expe- 
rience. 

So then, it is possible for human souls to possess 
spirit-life in an infinite number of degrees; from 
the life which characterizes the unevolved spirit, to 
that which constitutes the condition of an advanced 
and developed spirit. The spirit-life of a poor, 
unlettered savage who passes Beyond the Veil, after 
an earthly experience not much higher than that of 
the animal, is a life which is infinitely removed 
from the spirit-life of a St. John or a St. Paul; but 
still in both cases there is life; in the one case, 
latent and unevolved; in the other, developed and 



134 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

perfected. Now, in the words of the Saviour 
which we are considering, He refers to the imparta- 
tion from Himself of a particular kind of life. 
" Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and 
drink His blood, ye have not life in you." He must 
have referred to spirit-Wit of some sort, and not to 
physical life; otherwise it would not be true of 
millions who have not as yet received the imparted 
life of Jesus, that they "have not life" in them. 
Men and women are physically living, between 
whom and the Christ no spiritual contact has been 
established. 

" Ye have not life in you," He said. Did He im- 
ply that there was no spirit-life of any kind or 
degree in a human soul apart from this eating and 
drinking of Himself? Did He, e. g., mean that 
those souls of men, who had lived on earth before 
any knowledge of Him and of His relationship to 
the human race had been vouchsafed, had no spirit- 
life in them; although many of them had been 
groping in the dark for God, and intensely longing 
for spiritual things ? We cannot believe He meant 
this. He, the "Son of Man," knew that in every 
human spirit there were existing spiritual powers 
and forces which might, when evolved and per- 
fected, answer to that spirit-life that throbbed in 



The Higher Spirit-Life 135 

himself. Every human soul, He knew, was "the 
offspring " of the One great Spirit whom He called 
"Father." In every soul are latent potentialities; 
for every soul are infinite possibilities. His mis- 
sion, His power, was not to infix into man's consti- 
tution a set of spiritual capacities which had not 
been created before; not to remodel a physical be- 
ing into a spiritual being; but to take the spirit-life 
that had already been implanted in the soul (be- 
cause the spirit is an effluence from God), and to 
give it that further quickening and moving touch 
from His own developed and Divine spiritual Being, 
that should cause that spirit-life to grow, expand 
and mature into fuller and grander energy. In 
other words, the Lord Jesus recognized that there is 
latent spirit-life in every human soul: His work 
was to evolve that life, and to constitute it a 
developed life. Thus He said — "I came in order 
that they might hold life, and hold it in overflowing 
abundance" (xat Ttepiaadv k'^ajatv) (John 10: 10). 

The life of which our Lord was speaking, viz., 
that which accrues from the eating of His flesh and 
the drinking of His blood, is this developed life of 
the spirit He calls it the " seonial" life. "He 
that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath 
life aeonial." As the Son of God, that spirit-life, in 



136 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

its fullest development, resides in Him. As the Son 
of Man, He is in vital relationship with a race of 
beings which has been so Divinely constituted as to 
be able to develop, through Him, this fullest spirit- 
life. "I am that Life," said Jesus. "Come unto 
Me; you must draw your highest possibilities of 
spiritual being from Me. Ye shall be perfect, even 
as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. 
Would you adjust yourself to that Eternal Law 
which is working in every department of God's 
mighty universe — the law of Evolution — the law 
that from low types of life higher types are brought 
forth? I," says the Christ, "am the Power by 
which potentialities may become actualities. I am 
that quickening, onward-moving Influence that 
shall enable you to reach the goal of your spirit- 
being. You can only fully live when you are in ad- 
justment with your environment. You are a spirit, 
like the God who made you. Your environment is 
spiritual. Would you answer to the purpose of 
your being ? ' He that eateth Me, even he shall 
live by Me.' " 

We noted just now that our Lord described this 
developed form of spirit-life as the "gonial" life. 
What are we to understand by the adjective ? 

The word alwvws (aionios) is a derivative from the 



The Higher Spirit-Life 137 

Greek word aim (aion). An a\6v (or aeon) denotes 
an age, or a dispensation; and alwvios (aeonial) is 
that which pertains to, or characterizes an aeon. 

Now, St. Paul, in that wonderful Epistle to the 
Ephesians (the faulty translation of which has 
caused so many to miss great truths expressed 
therein), speaks of a great saving purpose of God 
which is to be worked out in a succession of aeons, 
or ages. In Ephesians 3 : 1 1 he calls it the " Purpose 
of the ceons." That is to say, that God, instead of 
saving souls only during a little period fixed for 
Him by some of the theologians, will go on doing 
so during vast epochs of duration, until His saving 
Purpose shall have been absolutely accomplished. 
Projecting his Divinely-illuminated mind into the 
far future, the Apostle foresees a time when a glo- 
rious, consummating aeon shall dawn; when " the 
restitution of all things " shall be effected, and God 
shall be "all in all" (rd ndvra £v ndffiv — all things in 
all beings). 

All the other aeons through which the saving Pur- 
pose of God worked will have passed — the earth- 
aeon, the duration of human life on the terrestrial 
plane; the aeons of judgment, disciplining, spiritual 
death and so on — all will have passed away with 
"the former things," and the great crowning aeon 



138 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

will have come. St. Paul describes that aeon as 
" The /Eon of the aeons " (Eph. y. 21). 

That will be the aeon from which a special glory 
will accrue to God. It will mark the complete 
achievement of God's "Purpose of the aeons"; it 
will celebrate the final abolition of evil; the silencing 
of the last discordant and jarring notes in a Uni- 
verse of Order, and will usher in that "one far- 
off Divine Event, to which the whole creation 
moves." 

The life of that Consummating y*Eon will be a 
glorious life — glorious, because a life imparted to 
every soul by the glorious " Saviour of all men "; a 
life whose characteristic will be the development of 
every spiritual faculty and power, and the con- 
cordant throb of the spirit and mind of man with 
the Spirit and Mind of the All-Father. 

It was to the spirit-life as thus developed — as it 
must be before the life of "the ./Eon " can be lived — 
that Jesus referred, when He said — "Whoso eateth 
My flesh and drinketh My blood hath life ceonial, 
and I will advance him at the last day." That 
"advance" from life-aeonial means to the human 
spirit that final anastasis — that greatest of all 
goings forward, — the soul's coronation with im- 
mortality. 



The Higher Spirit-Life 139 

One other point in respect to the spirit-life and 
power imparted by Jesus demands our notice. He 
said— "Whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My 
blood hath life-aeonial." The verb is in the present. 
The passage might be rendered correctly—" Is now 
holding, or possessing, life-seonial." 

That suggests two great truths, (a) Life aeonial 
is a condition, a disposition, an adjustment of our 
spirit, rather than a place, (b) It is a principle 
which can be energizing in a person now. Our 
soul may now be containing that very life which 
will characterize the life of God's great " ./Eon of 
the aeons." 

In other words, you and I may draw, at the pres- 
ent time, from the Great Spirit-life Imparter, that 
which will constitute our life of the ./Eon. 

The essential character of the life will be exactly 
the same. It is a Christ-life, and He and the spirit- 
life that streams from Him are "the same, yester- 
day and to-day, and all through the ceons " (Heb. 
12: 8). Under more favorable circumstances, with 
different surroundings, and with the removal of 
physical impediments, that aeonial life, imparted by 
Jesus, will, in the Hereafter, be able to better mani- 
fest itself than it can now. 

The quickened infant spirit is alive and energizing 



140 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

in the womb of the physical. When it emerges 
from that womb to a sphere of fuller experience 
and greater possibilities, it carries the same life with 
it. Christ's imparted gift of aeonial life to us makes 
us able to realize our relationship with God, and to 
live in communion with Him now. Our life in the 
/Eon will only mean that the sense of relationship 
and the fact of communion will have then become 
intenser realities to us. 

The aeonial life imparted to the spirit on earth will 
but put forth its best developments in that aeon- 
time of the future. The Christ in us now, "the 
hope of glory," will be the Christ in us then. The 
life imparted by Him of old, will be but the same 
life magnificently expanded and perfected. The 
stream of living water, so full and majestic as it 
merges into the Ocean of Eternity, will be the 
same stream that flowed for a while through the 
narrower channels of Time. These thoughts 
naturally lead us to the second point of our 
subject. 

II. Christ's impartation of this higher spirit- 
life. 

In what sense do we draw from the Divine Son 
of Man this aeonial-life principle into our spirit? 
There are thousands of sincere Christians, who 



The Higher Spirit-Life 141 

would find it very difficult to define their idea of 
how a spirit-power is imparted by Christ and re- 
ceived by us. Many make the mistake of con- 
founding the faith in themselves with the life- 
power that flows from the Saviour. A man sup- 
poses that because he accepts certain authorized 
doctrines concerning our Lord, he has faith; and be- 
cause he has faith, there has been imparted to him a 
spirit-life from the Master. But this by no means 
follows. One may intellectually, or non-intellec- 
tually, subscribe to any number of doctrines, and 
still not be in touch with Jesus in such a way as to 
make his mind and spirit receptive of the spiritual 
impartations of Him. 

If that be the case, all that such an one believes 
does not amount to faith. Faith is the adjustment 
of one's mind and spirit in regard to a Person, in 
contradistinction to any mere acceptance of state- 
ments made concerning that Person. "Faith" 
denotes trust in, reliance upon ; and it presupposes 
an object in respect to whom there is a certain dis- 
position of the mind and will. It is very note- 
worthy that our Lord always focused the thoughts 
of His hearers on His own Personality. Men's 
failure in obtaining aeonial life, He asserted, did not 
result from their non-acceptance of doctrines, but 



i4 2 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

from their non-contact with Him. "Ye do not 
will to come unto Me, that ye might hold life," He 
said. 

The first Article of the Apostles' Creed also em- 
phasizes the importance of distinguishing between 
the mere holding of certain ideas about God, and 
the functioning of our spirit, through the mind and 
will, toward Him. 

The clause should be — " I believe into God"; i. e., 
my faith not only establishes a set of notions in 
my mind concerning God, but projects my spirit 
into Him in such a way that I trust in, and rely 
upon Him. 

Then again, even in the case of those who really 
believe into Christ, there is a disposition sometimes 
to look more to the faith than to the Personal 
Christ, for the soul-life that is desired. 

Faith is sometimes (unconsciously, no doubt), set 
up in the stead of Jesus. A person supposes that 
his spirit-life will grow because of his faith, rather 
than because of a direct power communicated from 
the Person of the Saviour. " He shall live by Me," 
said Jesus; (Z-qnerai 3i ip.i) the preposition is fol- 
lowed by an accusative, and not by a genitive; i. e., 
" He shall live by Me, not merely as an instrumental 
means through whom, as a channel, life is con- 



The Higher Spirit-Life 143 

veyed to him; but by Me as the Fountain-head, the 
Source, of his communicated life-power." 

If the context of this particular passage be looked 
at (John 6: 57), it will be seen what a tremendous 
truth our Lord was teaching. Speaking of the 
necessity of eating His flesh and drinking His blood, 
He said — " In like manner as the Living Father hath 
sent Me, and I live because of the Father; so he that 
eateth Me, even that one shall live because of Me." 

No words than these could more plainly declare 
that the aeonial spirit-life which can exist in a 
human soul is a power drawn directly from the 
Person of the Christ. 

What are we to understand, then, by the Master's 
words — " Eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink 
His blood " ? We are aware, of course, that hun- 
dreds of thousands of earnest Christians regard this 
utterance of Christ as applying only to the Holy 
Communion. " Christ," say they, "took bread, and 
said — 'Take, eat; this is My body,' and took the 
Cup, and said, 'Drink ye all of this; for this is My 
blood.' From that (say they) it is perfectly plain 
that the eating of His flesh and the drinking of His 
blood to which He previously referred, was an eat- 
ing and drinking connected with this Sacrament 
ordained by Him." We fully admit that in the act 



144 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

of Holy Communion there can be that which the 
Master described as an eating of Him and a drink- 
ing of His blood; but we do not think that the 
eating and drinking of the Consecrated Elements, 
with whatsoever amount of faith and devotion, 
constitute the eating and drinking to which He was 
referring. 

The physical acts of eating and drinking are rep- 
resentative of a spiritual reception, and absorption 
and assimilation; but they do not constitute in 
themselves that which they represent. It is ad- 
mitted by our Church of England that a person 
may receive the Consecrated Elements without par- 
taking of the Body and Blood of our Lord; and it 
is also admitted in a rubric at the end of the service 
for "The Communion of the Sick," that one may 
"eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour 
Christ profitably to his soul's health, although he do 
not receive the Sacrament with his mouth." 

So then, the eating and drinking of which Jesus 
spoke, while it may accompany the physical eating 
and drinking which He appointed in Holy Com- 
munion, is quite distinct from the latter. Holy 
Communion is a representation of that other eating 
and drinking, and a means whereby it may be done; 
but it is not to be confounded with it. The one is 



The Higher Spirit-Life 145 

a physical reception and absorption; the other is a 
spiritual reception and absorption. Christ Himself 
said that these words spoken by Him "are spirit, 
and are life "; and thereby He gave us the clue to 
His meaning. The eating and drinking are acts of 
the spirit, and not of the flesh which "profiteth 
nothing." "The spirit," said He, "is that which is 
life-making" (to Zwoizoioov) (John 6: 63). What did 
our Lord mean by the term — "His flesh," and "His 
blood"? 

Well, He certainly did not mean the Flesh and 
Blood which composed His physical Body, present 
in that synagogue of Capernaum, where He was 
giving the discourse we are considering. Directly 
He perceived that His words were not understood, 
and that a materialistic construction had been placed 
upon them, He made a statement which negatived 
the idea that He was speaking of physical flesh and 
blood. " Doth this off end you ? What if ye should 
behold the Son of Man ascending where He was 
before!" As if He had said — " My departure from 
you and ascension to higher life, will be the proof to 
you that I am thinking of no eating of physical 
flesh and drinking of physical blood. I shall carry 
no physical body with Me into My risen-life — 
' Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of 



146 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

God.' I have told you that there can be no 
impartation of aeonial life apart from the eating of 
My flesh and the drinking of My blood. The 
eating and drinking of these temporary Con- 
stituents of My Being will be impossible to you, 
when in risen-life the physical will have been 
transmuted into the spiritual. Can you not under- 
stand that 1 am trying, in earthly language, to con- 
vey to your mind a great spiritual fact ? Can you 
not grasp that fact, when I tell you that it centres 
itself in Me, in a Living Personality, who will 
shortly be a non-physical Jesus ? " 

Our Lord Himself defined what He meant by His 
" Flesh." He meant Himself, His Person. That is 
quite clear, because when He reiterated His state- 
ment about the eating, He substituted for the word 
"flesh" the word "Me"— "He that eateth Me." 
That Christ, in His essential being, was not physical 
but spiritual. The Christ Himself was a Spirit, as 
we, in our essential being, are spirits. True, He 
wore for a while the garb of the physical, as we 
are wearing it; but both when tabernacled in a 
physical Body and out of it, the Christ was a Spirit. 
To eat Him, therefore, meant an eating of the 
spiritual. 

We get, then, to this point. Our Saviour Christ 



The Higher Spirit-Life 147 

taught that there must be an eating of His spiritual 
Self. We advance another stage. What did He 
mean by drinking His blood ? 

Very little difficulty presents itself in regard to the 
word "blood"; because throughout the Bible, and 
in accordance with Jewish usage, the word " blood" 
is the equivalent of "life" — e.g., "But flesh with 
the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye 
not eat" (Gen. 9:4). 

Christians who do not take this fact into con- 
sideration, and treat Eastern figures of speech as if 
they were Western literalities, fall into all sorts of 
crude notions concerning Gospel truth. "The 
blood of Jesus Christ," they say, "cleanses from 
all sin and saves souls." Quite so. That is a 
glorious fact. But ask them what they under- 
stand by "the Blood," and they will answer — 
"That physical Blood which was drawn by brutal 
hands from the scourged and crucified Jesus." 
They suppose that in some mysterious way this 
physical Blood effects a spiritual cleansing and 
perfecting. We, on the other hand, say— "No; 
like the Jews of old, you are regarding great 
truths, set forth in Eastern hyperbole, in too literal 
and materialistic a fashion. The ' blood ' is the 
' life.' The souls of sinners are cleansed and saved 



148 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

into perfection and immortality, not by any blood 
shed from a physical Body which was used for a 
while by the Spirit-Son of God; but by an imparted 
life that streams from His glorious, ascended, 
spiritual Self." 

We gather then, that when our Lord spoke of a 
drinking of His blood, He meant a drinking of a great 
life-power and influence that streams from Himself. 

It remains for us to consider what was meant 
by the Master in those terms — "eating" and 
" drinking." 

If, as we have seen, the words " flesh and 
blood " must not be interpreted in a physical sense, 
then, manifestly, the words "eating and drinking" 
must also not be so treated. If, by Christ's state- 
ment — " The words that I speak unto you are spirit 
and are life " — He imported a spiritual significance 
into the former words, He did the same thing in 
regard to the latter. 

In respect to the spirit of man, there is that which 
corresponds to the act of physical eating and drink- 
ing. What is it the physical part of us does when 
we eat and drink ? We receive, we absorb, we 
assimilate, that which is imparted. We incorporate 
it with our physical organization, and it becomes a 
living part of that organization. 



The Higher Spirit-Life 149 

That was the idea, we think, that Jesus had in 
His mind when He spoke about eating His spiritual 
Self and drinking in the life that flows from that 
Self. He was but expressing, in homely language, 
a mighty spiritual fact. He was but telling men, 
through the medium of analogy, that a great 
spiritual life-power, resident in Him, and imparted 
by Him, must be received, absorbed, and assimi- 
lated by the spirit of man, and must be so in- 
corporated with his spiritual constitution as to 
become a living part of it — the cause of the aeonial 
life in the soul. In the light of this truth, how 
luminous become His words — " Abide in Me, and I 
in you," " Because I live, ye shall live also." "Ye 
shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, 
and I in you." 

There remains one other point in connection 
with this subject, which we shall do well to re- 
member. It arises out of the word "except." 
"Except," says Jesus, "ye eat and drink with 
your spirit this life-making Influence and Power 
that streams from My risen Manhood, ye have 
not aeonial life in you." No human soul will 
ever reach the goal of its destiny apart from 
Jesus, "the Life," the "Advancement," the per- 
fecting Power of its being. Only by the Son 



150 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

of Man, by a spirit-life imparted by Him, can 
God's great saving "Purpose of the aeons" be 
accomplished, and the sons of men be made, 
in moral and spiritual likeness, the sons of God. 

Is there aught that we must do, in order that 
our spirit may eat and drink of the Spiritual 
Jesus ? Yes — there must be the disposing of the 
spirit to receive the imparted life-power from Him. 
With the percipient faculties of our spirit-self we 
shall see the Christ Behind the Veil; our thoughts 
will focus themselves on Him; our heart will want 
Him; our spirit will struggle to get into touch 
with Him; and through the telephone of Prayer 
the cry will be constantly reaching Him — "Mighty 
Lord of Life! impart Thine own inherent Power to 
me." 

And the answer that will, assuredly, come to 
such a receptive soul will be — the giving of that 
water of higher spirit-life that shall be "a well of 
water springing up toward life aeonial." 



CHAPTER VII 

BEGGAR-SPIRITS 

" Blessed are the poor (the beggars) in spirit ; because theirs is the 
kingdom of the heavens." — Matt. 5 : 3. 

In looking at these opening statements of our 
Lord in that wonderful Sermon preached by Him 
on the Mount, one cannot but be struck with the 
fact of how utterly unlike the general ideas of man- 
kind were the ideas He there propounded. 

The world had had its many teachers before He 
came to reveal the higher truths concerning God 
and Religion; and men had startled their hearers 
with the novelty and strangeness of what they 
taught; but never by any one had preconceptions 
been so ruthlessly assailed, traditional notions so 
upset, and religious ideas so revolutionized, as by 
Jesus. 

The greatest of all difficulties against which the 
Master had to contend in imparting Divine truth 
to mankind, was, to remove that obstructing sup- 
position, held by so many religious persons, viz., 
that what is contraraint to their own views must 
of necessity be erroneous. 



152 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

Men, as a rule, in regard to any teaching which 
is new to them, do not ask — "Is it true ? but is it 
in agreement with what we have been taught?" 
If it is not in agreement, then, according to many, 
there exists the strongest probability that it is 
false. The rejection of the "Larger Hope" by so 
many of our co-religionists at the present day, is 
due to no argument that can be sustained by an 
appeal to the Bible or reason, but that it is 
different from the ideas which have obtained 
currency in the past. That mental attitude was, 
of old, the bar to the inlet of Divine light on the 
minds of men; and it is the bar to-day. One of 
the hardest facts for some to learn is, that however 
extended may be their vision of truth, there are 
other truths lying beyond the horizon of their 
present knowledge, which are undreamed of, per- 
haps, by them. 

Has it ever struck you how completely opposite 
to the ideas of the time were the ideas that Jesus 
expressed in those Beatitudes ? Have you ever 
thought of how His teaching must have jarred 
upon the susceptibilities of those who heard Him 
speak ? 

We can picture the look of scorn and contempt 
that passed over the face and curled the lip of the 



Beggar-Spirits 153 

Pharisee, so satisfied with the infallibility of his 
Church and the moral and religious respectability 
of himself, as the Master belauded the ones who 
in spirit are beggar-like. We can almost hear the 
laugh of derision on the part of the fashionable, 
pleasure-seeking ones in that throng on that 
mountainside, as He accounted happy the souls 
that mourn. 

We can imagine the look of angry dissent that 
showed itself on the faces of proud and rule-loving 
priests and Romans, as He exalted the qualities of 
meekness and mercifulness and patience under 
wrongs suffered for righteousness' sake. Almost 
we see the impatient turning of the back upon 
the Speaker, and hear the disdainful exclamation — 
"Oh! he is mad!" as the Saviour said — "Rejoice; 
be exceeding glad, when men shall revile you, and 
persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil 
against you falsely, for My sake." Yes, Jesus was 
decidedly out of tune with the thoughts of the 
time, when He preached that Sermon! 

And yet the words spoken in that Sermon have 
revolutionized the ideas of millions in regard to 
what constitutes goodness and spiritual excellence. 

To those words we owe it that our conception of 
God is a better one than that presented by the Jew- 



154 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

ish Religion. To them we owe it that England as 
a nation, in spite of the irreligion of the masses, is 
immeasurably better in morals and practice than 
was ancient powerful Rome, or wealthy classical 
Greece. To those words it is due that the God- 
qualities of mercy, pity, benevolence, forgiveness 
and love are energizing in us as a people, to-day, 
better than they energized in men and women 
when Jesus walked this earth. To the leavening 
influence of those words, impregnated as they are 
with a spiritual power drawn from the Personality 
of the Divine Speaker, must we attribute it that 
there are to-day no curling lips, no disdainful looks, 
and no exclamations of resentment, when the 
preacher, in the name of Christ, denounces pride 
and unmercifulness, and belauds humility, forgive- 
ness and self-abnegation. 

Oh! yes, that mountain-sermon of Jesus Christ 
has never lost its power; its echo has never died 
away. As the ages roll on, and man's perceptions 
of the Spiritual grow brighter and truer, it will find 
its response in the hearts of all true men and 
women who are hungering and thirsting for real 
righteousness. 

It is with such thoughts as these that we proceed 
to consider the first of the Beatitudes. 



Beggar-Spirits 1 SS 

The words ol nru>xoi — which appear in the Greek 
of this passage, we translate differently from the 
translation in the Authorized Version. This will 
enable us the better to grasp the meaning of the 
Saviour's statement, and it may also remove a cer- 
tain misconception which may arise from the term 
"poor." 

It is suggestive, also, that our Lord should have 
placed this particular one as the first of the Beati- 
tudes. Was He, thereby, defining the soul-con- 
dition, out of which all other phases of blessedness 
must arise ? Was He telling men what must be the 
root of all true Religion; what the antecedent indis- 
pensable requirement for the satisfying of the soul's 
deepest longings; for the obtaining of mercy, for 
the vision of God, and for the proud distinction of 
being called "the children of God " ? We think He 
was. We think that the Master, in His own quiet 
and significant manner, was telling us that the con- 
dition of our spirit must constitute our heaven in 
Time and our heaven in Eternity. "The kingdom 
of God is within you," said Jesus. "Blessed are 
the beggars (ol tztw^oX) in spirit; because theirs is 
the kingdom of the heavens." 

It may help us to understand this subject better, 
if we first consider what our Lord did not mean in 



156 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

saying — " Blessed are the beggars in spirit." Most 
certainly He did not mean that there can be any 
blessedness in the spiritual part of our manhood be- 
ing poverty-stricken. The passage in the Author- 
ized Version of the New Testament — " Blessed are 
the poor in spirit" — seems to lend a support to 
such a supposition. We are familiar with the re- 
proachful expression — " A poor-spirited indi- 
vidual " ; and there are some persons who have 
never honestly set themselves to find out what it is 
that Jesus really taught; persons, moreover, who 
have had the misfortune, perhaps, to come into 
contact with some Christians in regard to whom 
the term "poor-spirited" is not misapplied— who 
quite sincerely imagine that poor-spiritedness is a 
characteristic of consistent Christianity. It is that 
idea which causes numbers of men to hold aloof 
from Religion. They have the notion that the 
mental attitude of a Christian is incompatible with 
robust manhood. Were they to voice their 
thoughts, they would say something of this kind 
— "Well, you see, we consider Christianity an 
excellent thing for women and old persons; but its 
principles are not at all suited to strong and self- 
reliant manhood. Your Master, Himself, bade you 
be 'poor in spirit'; and, to be quite candid, we 



Beggar-Spirits 157 

have a supreme dislike to poor-spirited individuals, 
especially to men of that stamp." 

Our reply to them is that the Christ has been 
misunderstood. He never bade us be " poor in 
spirit," in the sense that is sometimes supposed; 
and if an unsatisfactory translation of a word in the 
Greek New Testament (nrw^oi) has caused any to 
make such a mistake, there is a better translation 
which completely negatives the idea. 

"Blessed are the beggars in spirit," said Jesus; 
and He was not referring to a spiritual destitution, 
but to a spiritual attitude — an attitude which is the 
God-appointed condition whereby we can be en- 
riched from Infinite resources. 

He had no thought of our spirit being impover- 
ished and feeble. Knowing that our spirit, like His 
own perfect Spirit, was designed to be a powerful 
and energizing Principle that shall call into play 
every quality that constitutes true and rightly- 
balanced manhood, He never meant that any poor- 
ness—any inability to function fully, or any phase 
of non-development, could possibly be an advan- 
tage to it. No, the Christ had quite another idea 
than of poverty in His mind, when He said — 
"Blessed are the beggars in spirit." We have to 
realize what our spirit is in relation to our whole 



158 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

being as men and women. It is our essential self; 
that upon which everything else pertaining to our 
manhood is built, and it is the formative Principle 
from which all the attributes that constitute man- 
hood arise. To the spirit belong Mind and Will, 
and from the exercise of Mind and Will result in- 
tuitions, aspirations, emotions, love and so on. 
Poverty of spirit involves poverty of Mind and Will 
and a corresponding feebleness in their manifesta- 
tions. 

The mind and will of Christian men ought to be 
greater energizing principles than the mind and will 
of those who are not Christians. The Christian has 
that which an irreligious man has not; he has a 
wider domain of thought in which his mind may 
exercise itself, and by virtue of his connection with 
God, a Divine Will-Force is imparted which en- 
hances the strength of his own will. 

In respect, therefore, to the two great manifesta- 
tions of spirit-life — viz., the exercise of Mind and 
Will, Christianity instead of tending to make one 
"poor in spirit," makes one rich. The develop- 
ment of the spirit's powers, as it manifests itself 
through the channels of Mind and Will, is the very 
purpose of the salvation of Christ. To produce a 
"poor" spirit would be to frustrate that purpose. 



Beggar-Spirits 159 

To those who think out of the groove of conven- 
tional religious thought, this, of course, appears a 
mere truism; but it is not so to many Christians. 
We believe that when the spirit of a man turns 
Godward, and realizes its vital relationship to Him, 
a tremendous incentive is given to the Mind and 
Will to function more vigorously. The vastness of 
God, in conscious relationship with us, ought, in 
the proper order of things, to open up a vastness in 
regard to Thought. It ought not to be accounted 
right that no Christian should exercise his mind out- 
side the limits affixed by other Christians hundreds 
of years since. Man's knowledge of Divine truth, 
like every other kind of knowledge, is progressive; 
and men by the exercise of mind, may, in obedience 
to an acknowledged law of God, understand the 
Gospel far better to-day than it was understood five 
hundred or a thousand years ago. Protestant 
Christianity admits this in relation to the teaching 
of the Roman Church; she denies it in relation to 
any teaching which is in advance of her own. The 
man who, by prayer, is living in communion with 
God, has by that very fact opened up an illimitable 
domain in regard to Mind. In such a case, to stifle 
Thought, or to confine it within the narrow chan- 
nels marked out by others in the long past, is 



160 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

a fatal mistake. It is an indication of spiritual 
poverty. Thought is the evidence of the soul's 
life, and, like all life that is not declining, it can- 
not remain stationary. There are many Chris- 
tians whose mental condition exhibits this spiritual 
poverty. 

They accept certain religious views for no other 
reason than that they have been authoritatively 
pronounced to be "orthodox" by some leader, or 
Council, or Church. They never allow themselves 
to think about those views. Nay more, they con- 
sider it positively wrong to do so. They imagine 
that to question anything which has been labeled 
" De Fide " by the School to which they belong is an 
indication of a lack of faith, and so when doubts 
arise they are instantly extruded as being imcom- 
patible with what is good. 

They elect not to think for themselves; not to set 
themselves earnestly to ascertain what is truth; but 
to leave others to settle that point for them. Sur- 
rendering all right to think, except in strict accord- 
ance with what has been defined, they, like a great 
intellect who left the English Church for a Church 
whose claim to final authority is more pretentious, 
prostrate their mind at the feet of any ecclesiastical 
community or sect that asserts infallibility, and im- 



Beggar-Spirits 161 

agine that to think reasonably and logically is inim- 
ical to faith. 

Persons of this mental stamp can do that which 
astonishes others whose mind is differently consti- 
tuted. They can love God and exhibit all kinds of 
moral excellencies, and yet assent at the same time 
to doctrines which are opposed to every conception 
of love, justice and mercy. Such persons have 
lulled their mind into so great a condition of inac- 
tivity as to make it insensible to argument. You 
may prove to them that the passages of Scripture 
upon which have been reared huge doctrinal super- 
structures of horror and unreason are mistransla- 
tions. They will only shake their head, and tell 
you that your mind has been ensnared by the Evil 
One. You may show them that what one Council 
has declared to be true, another Council has pro- 
claimed untrue. That will not provoke them to 
consider the matter independently. They have ante- 
cedently settled to whom they will listen. Con- 
vinced that their assent to certain doctrines will 
secure to them God's favor and a passport to 
heaven, they consider that there is a decided virtue 
in not permitting the mind to think. 

These are they who must be classed among the 
poor in spirit. In that great department of their 



162 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

being — the mind — through which their spirit ener- 
gizes, there is arrested development. Thought in 
them has reached a halting stage. They are not 
the ones whom the Saviour called "blessed." 

Again, in regard to that other medium through 
which the spirit expresses itself — the Will — a mis- 
taken idea is often entertained. Too frequently it 
is supposed that the suppression of the will-power 
in us is an indication of high spiritual development. 
It is nothing of the kind. The person of little or no 
will-power is a being of spiritual non-development. 
There are numbers of sincere persons who account 
the complete extinguishment of their will for the 
Will of God, or for the will of some Church, or 
person that is regarded as an agent of God, as the 
culminating point of Christian excellence. Such 
persons will pray — "Thy Will be done in earth as 
it is in heaven," and imagine that they are asking 
for grace to become so passive and will-less, as just 
to submit themselves to the Will of the Almighty. 
They are wrong; that is not the magnificent mean- 
ing of the petition. Other such persons enter a 
monastery or nunnery, or a brotherhood or sister- 
hood, and by unconditionally surrendering to an- 
other their will, and the right to order their thoughts 
and the concerns of their life, imagine that they are 



Beggar-Spirits 1 63 

advancing their spirit's growth. They, too, are 
wrong. The growth of no spirit is advanced by 
the suppression of Will-power. The petition in the 
Lord's Prayer is no supplication for the extinguish- 
ment of our will in such a way that we may be- 
come merely passive, and endure the Will of God. 
That would be to ask God to take away from us a 
magnificent power with which He has endowed 
us. The words of the petition are not simply that 
we may endure in a right spirit that which the Will 
of God may order or permit; but that the Will of 
God may be done. " Let Thy Will become (yev7]0TjTaj) 
as in the heaven so also upon the earth." The Will 
of God is done in heaven; not merely endured. 
The highest spheres of spirit-life are not peopled 
by automata, whose will-power has been absorbed 
by the Supreme Will-power of the universe. Every 
exalted being there is doing the Will of God be- 
cause he, himself, is willing to do it. In other 
words, the doing of God's Will in heaven involves 
not the suppression and inertia of other wills, but 
the enhancement of their energy to such an extent 
as to make them function concordantly with the 
Will of God. An angel who only suffered the Will 
of God and did not actually do it, would be a being 
"poor in spirit." His spirit, in one of its depart- 



164 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

ments of energy, would be inoperative. The same 
principle applies in regard to God's Will being done 
on earth. God's Will will never be done here like 
as It is in heaven, until the will of every man is so 
cultivated and quickened in power as to be energiz- 
ing concurrently and harmoniously with the Will 
of God. And that implies the activity, and not the 
passivity, of the will of man. It implies that we 
must be actively doing, and not simply meekly 
enduring, the Will of our Father. Thus, the one, 
however good in other respects, who schools him- 
self to will nothing and do nothing in regard to 
the experiences of life, but to suffer patiently and 
resignedly the Will of God, is not advancing his 
spirit's growth. Patience and Resignation are Chris- 
tian graces, and bring down upon us God's bless- 
ing; but only so when they cause our will to 
motion still more actively Godward. Extinguish- 
ment or suppression of will-power denotes poverty 
in spirit, and the Christ was not belauding this. 

It is for this reason that any religious system 
which demands the absolute surrender of the will 
of a person to the will of another is harmful to the 
spirit. There may be advantages connected with 
the monastic and conventual life, but they are over- 
balanced by the disadvantage that arises from the 



Beggar-Spirits 165 

will-power of a person being made inactive. The 
one who elects to hand over either to a person or a 
Church his right to think and to will; who renders 
implicit obedience to commands whether they com- 
mend themselves to his reason or not; and who, 
instead of ruling his spirit himself, allows another 
to rule it, is no robust and developed Christian. 
He is one of the " poor in spirit." Not of such was 
the Saviour speaking. He pronounced no blessing 
on arrested development in Mind or in Will. The 
Christian, for the very reason that he is a Christian, 
is meant to be pre-eminently a being of Thought. 
All restriction and coercion of Mind is, therefore, 
harmful to his spirit. If he be living in com- 
munion with God, the vigorous energizing of his 
mind, which for a while may even lead him to hold 
erroneous views, is more conducive to his spirit's 
growth than any sleepy acquiescence in doctrines, 
accepted without thought and real conviction, can 
ever be. A truth lies crystallized in those words — 
"There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, 
than in half the creeds," because "honest doubt" 
is an indication of the thrill of mental life, and there 
can be no real faith allied to mental inactivity or 
stagnation. The Christian, too, because he is a 
Christian, is meant to be pre-eminently a being of 



166 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

Will — a being who, because his will has been 
brought into contact with the Divine-Will, has 
received an imparted strength, which should make 
his controlling power of himself greater than that 
of non-Christian men. 

To what, then, was our Lord alluding when He 
said — " Blessed are the beggars in spirit " ? As we 
have already asserted, He was thinking not of the 
spiritual condition, but of the attitude of the spirit. 
A man's spirit can be described as " blessed" when, 
before the great Father-Spirit it is in the attitude of 
a beggar. 

It may seem strange and paradoxical, but it is a 
fact, that man's spirit is never so strong as when it 
feels that, apart from God, it is very weak; never 
so magnificently independent as when it knows it 
is utterly dependent upon Him; never so capable of 
so much as when conscious that it can do so little 
without His aid; never so full of life and vigor as 
when it realizes that in Him it "lives, and moves 
and has its being"; and never so rich and resource- 
ful as when it is absolutely conscious that except 
for Him it has nothing. Yes, it is distasteful to us 
who are so puffed up with the idea of our own 
importance and self-respectability and independ- 
ence, that the Saviour Christ should have taught 



Beggar-Spirits 167 

that we are grander in our spiritual being; that we 
better fulfil the design of our being, and only secure 
for ourselves happiness and blessedness, when we 
stand before the great Diagnoser of every one as the 
" beggar-spirits." 

"Two men went up into the temple to pray"; 
the one was a beggar-spirit, and the other was not. 
Both were beings "poor in spirit." The one was 
lacking in spiritual development and did not know 
it; the other was in a like condition, and did know 
it. The man who was not a beggar-spirit stood 
and prayed "with himself"—*', e., he did not pray 
at all. Like a good many of the religious ones who 
have succeeded him, his first thought was to remind 
the Almighty of the sharp contrast between himself 
and those whom he regarded as outside the pale of 
goodness. He was so supremely self-satisfied with 
his supposed own inherent resourcefulness, that it 
never struck him that he owed whatever spiritual 
respectability he had to the Being he was worship- 
ing. He merely thanked God for not having made 
him "as other men are." The other man — the 
beggar-spirit, prayed quite otherwise. No contrast 
between himself and others did he draw. Not a 
word suggesting self-resourcefulness did he utter. 
He had a consciousness that he was not what he 



168 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

ought to be, and a wish to be better than he 
was; but he knew that the possibility of better 
things, and the very desire for them, were both of 
God. 

"God be merciful to me, a sinner," cried the 
spirit beggar-man, and of that one the Master 
Christ said — " I tell you, this man went down to 
his house justified in the act of prayer rather than 
the other." 

Two particular reasons suggest themselves why a 
spirit in the attitude of a beggar is blessed, (a) In 
that attitude we rightly adjust ourselves to receive 
the blessings of God. 

One of the great laws of God, which Science of 
late years has helped us to understand more fully, is 
the one known as "adaptation to environment." It 
tells us that no creature in non-adjustment to its 
right environment can receive those blessings that 
are meant to accrue therefrom. 

That is a principle which we know obtains in the 
Physical World, and without doubt it obtains 
throughout the universe of God. For example: — 
There are certain blessings that come to the tree 
from its environment — the soil, the atmosphere, the 
rain and the sunlight. There are blessings that 
come to the fish, the bird and the animal, from their 



Beggar-Spirits 169 

environments — the water, the air and the food- 
supplying earth. But each of these recipients of 
blessing must be adjusted to its particular environ- 
ment in order to receive it. The tree standing out 
of the soil, or the fish removed from the water, or 
the bird deprived of the air, or the animal taken away 
from the green earth, is incapable of receiving the 
blessings of its environment. They are not in 
adjustment. Then, again, in order to receive the 
blessings arising from environment, there must be 
the right functioning in regard to that environment. 
The tree, the fish, the bird, and the animal must 
properly dispose themselves toward their surround- 
ings. They can draw no blessing apart from this 
rightful disposition. 

Yes, and this rightful disposition on their part is 
the beggar-attitude. The Lord of Physical Nature 
has said to His Material Universe exactly what He, 
as the Lord of Spirit, has said to His Spiritual 
Universe — " Blessed are the beggars." And so, 
every tree that stretches out its rootlets to drink in 
the moisture, and its boughs to catch the dew and 
sunshine; and every fish that scours the waters, and 
bird that cleaves the air, and animal that roams the 
earth, is a beggar. Each in its own dumb way is 
saying — " Apart from my right environment, I have 



170 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

nothing. To it, and not to myself, am I looking for 
the blessing of my being." 

Translate that truth into the domain of the 
Spiritual. No human spirit can receive the blessed- 
ness of its being, apart from its adjustment to its 
right environment. That adjustment of a spirit 
is as much a part of God's Purpose in regard to 
it, as is the attainment of blessedness. Of no 
soul is it true that God never contemplated its 
perfection and blessedness. We are aware, of 
course, that the Western Christian Church has for 
centuries, more or less, lain under that awful 
shadow of a doctrine conceived by Augustine, 
and developed to its culminating horror by Calvin 
— viz., that "the elect" only are meant to obtain 
blessedness. But it is not true. It slanders God. 
It strips Him of all right to be called "One God 
and Father of all " (Eph. 4: 6), and undermines the 
very foundation-principle of the Gospel, that "God 
so loved the world." Every human soul was 
created in view of being blessed. Deny that, and 
the Bible stands convicted of being hopelessly 
illogical in ascribing All-Fatherhood to God and 
All-Saviourhood to Christ. Again, that every 
human soul was made for adaptation to its right 
environment is also certain. No mind but the 



Beggar-Spirits 1 7 1 

theological mind would have ever supposed other- 
wise. Every physical object around us is a 
witness to this truth. The plants, trees, insects, 
fishes, birds, animals and physical man have all 
been constructed in such a way, and endowed 
with such faculties and powers, as to make it 
plain that a right functioning toward their environ- 
ment was the purpose of their construction. Are 
we to suppose that God ever calls into being those 
higher creations — human souls — without this in- 
herent capability of adaptation ? We have been 
told that He does. We have been assured that 
the Father-God has called into existence His great 
family of human spirits, of whom only a few, 
comparatively, were intended to reach the pos- 
sibility of their being; and that even these were 
not inherently endowed with the least power 
of doing so. That theology which is fast losing 
its hold of thoughtful minds, has taught that a 
human spirit is created an utterly feeble and 
unendowed thing; except that a good God has 
given it the power of existing miserably forever in 
non-adjustment to its environment. It has taught 
that, before conversion, all human souls must be 
regarded not as the children of God, but as "the 
children of the devil." It seems never to strike 



172 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

the supporters of this view that, to say the least 
of it, it is rather strange and paradoxical that a God 
of Love should design the myriads of His human 
creatures in such a way that after they have left 
His creative hand they are no better than the off- 
spring of Satan. 

According to that teaching, the Almighty, in 
the creation of human souls, has not done so much 
for them as He has done for the seeds of plants. 
All seeds are endowed with potentialities of 
blessing. Have human souls not been corre- 
spondency endowed ? Is it true that no soul can 
come within the possibility of blessing, until by a 
Divine power, exercised not for all but only for 
the few, it has been constitutionally reconstructed ? 
We think not. We think the idea dishonors God. 
We believe that as every seed, every egg of 
insect, fish, or bird, and every unborn offspring of 
beast or man, has within itself certain faculties 
and potentialities, put there by its Maker, by 
which the attainment of designed blessing is 
possible, so every human spirit has within itself 
those powers, by the rightful exercise of which it 
can attain the blessing designed for it. If a 
human soul is higher in the scale of being than 
the physical objects of creation, is it not rather 



Beggar-Spirits 173 

unreasonable to imagine that God has implanted, 
as the endowment of being, for advancement and 
blessing, so much in the seeds, and nothing at all 
in human souls. The theory that we are born as 
"children of wrath" implies that. 

It may be objected, that this view of the spirit 
of man, being, by the fact of its creation, possessed 
of those latent powers which render it capable of 
adjustment — does away with the necessity of what 
is termed "conversion," the "second birth," or 
"regeneration." 

We answer — "By no means does it do away 
with the need of that Divine reality symbolized by 
those terms." But conversion, or regeneration, 
does not involve God's bestowal on the human 
spirit of a set of faculties not possessed before, or 
a reorganization of the spiritual constitution in such 
a way as to put it in another class of being. Our 
spirit, because it is an emanation from God, the 
great Parent-Spirit, comes into being with inherent 
potentialities. Conversion is that Divine touch, 
that quickening of already-existing latent powers, 
by which the soul is aroused to conscious life, and 
made to function rightly. Our Lord described 
that Divine after-touch of the soul as a begetting 
from above. "Except a man be begotten avwOev," 



174 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

i. e., from a source above; from something out- 
side himself. It is the same in regard to human 
souls as it is in regard to seeds. Neither are 
brought into existence by God as resourceless and 
unendowed creatures; both possess potentialities, 
however latent and undeveloped, that make 
adaptation to environment possible; but both 
also need that quickening touch that comes from 
right environment. Place a seed, or an egg, where 
neither light nor heat nor moisture can reach it, 
and although all the potentialities of life are within 
it, no advance toward growth and blessedness will 
be made. It needs, not the faculties by which it 
can attain development and perfection, but that 
enkindling power from without to cause those 
faculties to function rightly. 

When our Lord said a man must be begotten 
Sivwdev, He was but proclaiming the same truth in 
regard to human spirits. By those words He was 
not declaring that we have been fashioned by God 
as beings with no capacity for blessing; He was but 
telling us what the Bible has told us — viz., that man 
was made " in the image of God," /. e., with a soul 
marvelously endowed with powers fitting it for 
union with Him; but that those soul-powers stand 
in need of that further Divine touch from without 



Beggar-Spirits 175 

in order that they may answer the end for which 
they were implanted. Now, the environment of 
our spirit is God. Our spirit was created by Him; 
it is a spark, an individualized effluence from Him. 
St. Paul asserted that fact when he said — " In Him 
we live, and move, and have our being " ; and 
stamped as true the utterance of the Athenian poets 
— " For we are also His offspring" (Acts 17: 28). 
We adjust ourselves to our God-environment, when 
by that touch of Him the faculties of our spirit-self 
are made to function Godward. 

Yes, and that adjustment constitutes us beggar- 
spirits; because simultaneously with the soul's 
awakening to move toward God, comes the further 
conviction that apart from Him, — the true Environ- 
ment, — the soul's blessing is an impossibility. 

(b) Another reason suggests itself why the spirit 
in the attitude of a beggar is blessed. In that 
attitude it better realises the possibilities of its 
being, which realisation affords it an incentive to 
develop itself. 

There is no greater spur to any one's efforts to be 
something more than he is than the conviction that 
it is possible for him to become so. Men remain 
small in mind and character and influence, because 
it never strikes them that it is possible for them to 



176 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

make themselves great. The ones who have 
achieved their triumphs in art, science, literature, or 
anything else, are they who have been convinced 
that possibilities are open to them. 

Men and women who, like the Pharisee of the 
parable, are so satisfied with the spiritual condition 
to which they have attained, as never to realize 
how very much better they might be, never make 
any advance in spiritual development. The incen- 
tive to develop is lacking. The self-satisfied Chris- 
tian has no possibilities of soul-being, as far, at all 
events, as this world is concerned. He thinks he 
has attained them; it only remains for him to con- 
gratulate himself that he is so good. 

Now, however strange it may seem, it is never- 
theless true, that never so well do we realize the 
possibilities of our spiritual being, and thereby re- 
ceive incitement to grow Godward, as when we 
assume the attitude of the beggar-spirit. We can 
easily perceive why. 

There are three distinct phases of thought in the 
mind of one who begs. First, there is the thought 
of his poverty, and that he might be better circum- 
stanced than he is. Next, the thought of the re- 
sourcefulness of the one to whom he is appealing, 
and the probability that help will be proffered. 



Beggar- Spirits 1 77 

And lastly, the realization that a betterment in 
circumstances is possible. 

Now, suppose that one in dire want and distress, 
and who is incapable, himself, of improving his lot, 
were to determine resolutely that he would never 
assume the beggar-attitude, that under no con- 
ditions would he ask or receive help and blessing 
from any one. What then ? With no prospect of 
betterment in regard to his circumstances to cheer 
and raise him, he would doggedly and sullenly set 
himself just to endure his experiences, and no more. 
Possibilities that would have been open to him as 
the seeker of help, are closed because of his spirit 
of independence. That man, because he has no 
realization of any possibilities in regard to his wel- 
fare, becomes inactive. 

On the other hand, let another in precisely like 
circumstances of need assume the attitude of the 
beggar; i. e., let him cast away his pride and inde- 
pendence, and gratefully receive from outside him- 
self the help that will enable him to rise to higher 
conditions of experience. What then ? Will not 
that very importation of possibility into his expe- 
rience be to him a spur to move onward ? 

Apply this to our spirit. Our Saviour Christ said 
— " Blessed are the beggar-spirits." 



178 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

Well, there are three distinct phases of thought in 
the spirit who begs. 

It thinks of its poverty. It knows that it has 
reached no more than partial development, while 
the God-appointed goal for it is Perfection. That 
contrast between what it is and what it was made 
to become, humbles it. It looks at itself and its 
spiritual acquirements, and says — " I am very poor, 
very undeveloped. I feel I have any amount of 
capacity for being what I am not, and for having 
what I do not possess. I have a mind. I know it 
to be a priceless endowment; but it is terribly un- 
developed. It is little I know; it is the great I do 
not know. I have a will. That, too, is a magnifi- 
cent gift: an imparted God-power. But, oh! it 
acts so erratically. It is so difficult to keep it in 
tune with its Parent-Will. I have a heart. I know 
it could be made big enough and strong enough to 
hold all the yearnings and to respond to all the 
mighty impulses of Love; but it is a poor, feeble 
thing — my heart — and often loves but little. I have 
a character, and it contains the promises of Christ- 
like flowers of grace; but it is very disappointing: 
there is as yet nothing in it but the unopened buds 
of moral excellence. I have a spiritual nature. 
That, too, I know, was meant to be a cosmos of 



Beggar-Spirits 179 

beauty and grandeur; but it is not such. Its crook- 
edness, its hollows and its uglinesses make it more 
of a chaos than a cosmos. Oh! yes — I am, indeed, 
a beggar-spirit in condition. 1 am poor and needy 
and undeveloped. Help me, help me, O, my 
Father-God." 

Then the beggar-spirit passes to another phase of 
thought. It thinks about the resourcefulness of the 
One to whom it has appealed. That mental condi- 
tion is the precursor of spiritual advance. We are 
never so well-disposed toward the attainment of 
the designed consummation of our being, as when 
our unsatisfactory diagnosis of ourself compels us 
to look outward for that which we know we want. 
The beggar-experience that forces in upon our 
spiritual consciousness the fact that we are very 
poor, but God is very rich, is a salutary one. 

It turns the mind of the individual from the dis- 
heartenment and hopelessness that arise from the 
thoughts being centred only on the self, to the en- 
couragement and promise of blessing that come 
from their being turned toward another. That 
mental attitude is the principle to which the writer 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews refers, as a powerful 
incentive to spiritual progress. " Let us run with 
patience the race that is set before us, looking unto 



180 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

Jesus" (Hebrews 12: 1, 2). The English translation 
of the words, a<popG>vT£<; el<; t6v Iyjgouv, fails to bring 
out the full significance of the Greek. Literally 
translated, the words mean — looking away from 
toward Jesus. They exactly describe this second 
phase of thought on the part of the beggar-spirit — 
the looking away from the poverty of the self to 
the resourcefulness of the Saviour. That is exactly 
the attitude of every being and object that is making 
for the end of its being — perfection. Every phys- 
ical creation is dumbly appealing to its environment 
for help; is looking toward a resourcefulness out- 
side itself. In every plant and tree that extends its 
rootlets for the moisture, and its branches for the 
light, and in every creature that disposes itself to 
bask in the sunshine, we have the physical corre- 
spondence of a great spiritual reality. The human 
spirit, like the physical object, must realize, if it 
would advance, that its power of so doing is 
drawn from a resourcefulness without. It is the 
sense of that which makes men and women beings 
of Prayer. In the act of praying, they make them- 
selves blessed. They acknowledge that they are 
beggar-spirits. 

Then there is that last phase of thought which 
presents itself to the spirit who begs. It realizes 



Beggar-Spirits 1 8 1 

the possibilities open to it. Its identification of 
itself with God, its Environment, induces that idea. 
As soon as the beggar-attitude has brought a spirit 
into relationship with Him, it realizes, not only 
what it is, not only what a contrast is presented be- 
tween itself and the Being before whom it is stand- 
ing as a suppliant for help, but also what tremen- 
dous possibilities of being are open to it, because 
it is in adjustment with Infinite resourcefulness. 
To the beggar-spirit, with his gaze riveted upon a 
God all rich, and all willing to bestow His riches 
upon those who ask, no height of blessing appears 
unattainable. The words of the Christ ring in his 
ears — "All things are possible to him that be- 
lieveth," i. e., to him who is relying upon God. Of 
course, this realization of possibility in regard to our 
spirit will give an enormous incentive to our spir- 
itual nature to function Godward. Nothing will so 
spur one to the required effort toward a high aim as 
the deeply-seated conviction that the attainment of 
that aim is possible and assured. The beggar- 
spirits are blessed, as the Christ said, because in 
that posture they link themselves with Divine re- 
sourcefulness; and only then do they realize the pos- 
sibilities of their being as " the offspring of God "; 
and only then do they have the right incentive to a 



182 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

good life — viz., not thereby to escape the horrors 
of a Mediaeval-hell, but to answer the great Pur- 
pose of the All-Father in creating them — viz. — to 
become perfect. 

There is just one other point in connection with 
this Beatitude to which we would allude. Our Sa- 
viour Christ in saying — " Blessed are the beggars in 
spirit," added, " because theirs is the kingdom of 
the heavens." The verb, in this latter clause of the 
passage, is in the present and not in the future 
tense. He does not proclaim a blessedness that 
shall be, but a blessedness that now is. 

What did He mean ? What is the " kingdom of 
the heavens," or as it might be rendered, "the 
kingdom of heavenly-things " ? Well, it is a con- 
dition, rather than a locality. The Master, when 
walking this earth, as "a Man of sorrows and ac- 
quainted with grief," said, in speaking of Himself — 
" The Son of Man which is in heaven " (John y. 13). 
On another occasion, He said — " The kingdom of 
God is within you" (Luke 17:21). Was not the 
Master teaching us in those words, that the human 
spirit who has adjusted itself to its true Environ- 
ment, who in its attitude toward God is the beggar, 
need never assume the depressed and melancholy 
airs of those earnest, but mistaken, ones who ac- 



Beggar-Spirits 183 

count the earth-life a ' ' dreary, howling wilderness " ; 
but that even here, in spite of the disappointment 
and non-development attached to their spirit's so- 
journ amid the things of the Physical, there can be a 
heaven within them, which in God's own time 
shall merge into that larger heaven of consummated 
Blessedness and Perfection ? 



CHAPTER VIII 

OUR HOPE IN GOD'S JUDGMENTS 

" I am afraid of Thy judgments." — Ps. 1 19 : 120. 
" I have hoped in Thy judgments." — Ps. 119: 43. 

These two passages when put side by side appear 
contradictory and irreconcilable. The Psalmist was 
thinking about God as the Upholder and Vindicator 
of righteousness, and also of the consequences 
which must accrue to any soul, in this or any other 
world, who becomes out of tune with Divine 
Order. In view of those consequences he says — 
"I am afraid of Thy judgments." Almost in the 
same breath he has said — "My hope is in Thy 
judgments." 

We ask — Is it possible for one to hope for that of 
which he is afraid? Yes; under certain circum- 
stances. If we can regard that which inspires fear 
in us as a something invested with possibilities of 
remedy and ultimate blessing, we can hope in it. 
For example, the poor, suffering creature, whose 
condition calls for a painful surgical operation, is 
afraid of it — often terribly afraid of it; but he 
knows his recovery to health depends upon it; and 



Our Hope in God's Judgments 185 

so he can hope in it. Had the Psalmist a corre- 
sponding idea to this in respect to the judgments of 
God? We think he had; or else how could he 
have said — " I have hoped in them "? Had he 
regarded God's judgments in the way in which so 
many Christians have regarded them — viz., as 
manifestations of Divine wrath and vengeance, as 
means only to punish sinners, and as agents to 
bring upon human souls final ruin and overthrow, 
could he have entertained any hope in regard to 
them? We think not. Nay more; we ask, If he 
held the popular idea that the judgments of God are 
vindictive and not remedial, for what could he 
hope ? Surely, he was not so bad a man as to be 
able to experience any pleasure in the anticipation 
that millions of his race, by those judgments, will 
be engulfed in ruin forever and ever! For a man 
to hope for that would mean that he has the dis- 
position of a demon and not that of a man. Any 
man who can believe the judgments of God to be 
what the theology of the past has taught them as 
being, and can then hope in them, is not the kind of 
being that any intelligent mind can connect with 
either goodness or true religion. We hold it to be 
inconceivable that any one with the spirit of Christ 
in him could be glad and expectant in regard to any 



186 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

ordering of God which is invested only with the 
awful characteristics of retribution and destruction. 
As a matter of fact, those who assent to the West- 
ern doctrine of an everlasting hell, which represents 
God's judgments as final and non-remedial, and 
thereby stamps them with unutterable horror, have 
to part company with the Psalmist in the expression 
of any hope in respect to them. They fear them ; 
but you never hear them say — " I have hoped in 
them." The contrast between the high moral tone 
inculcated by the Religion they profess and the 
total absence of moral tone that would be exhibited 
in such an aspiration, is too startlingly glaring and 
anomalous. These persons are infinitely more 
pitiful and merciful than the God they imagine; 
and are too feeling and unselfish ever to bring them- 
selves to say of the judgments of God (as they have 
been taught to understand them) — " I will sing of 
mercy and judgment" (Ps. 101 : i). "My soul 
breaketh for the longing that it hath unto Thy judg- 
ments at all times" (Ps. 119: 20). Let Thy judg- 
ments help me" (Ps. 119: 175). 

We ask, can any one who holds the Mediaeval 
idea concerning God's judgments, endorse these 
utterances of the Psalmist ? If those judgments be 
simply punitive and irremedial in their character; if 



Oar Hope in God* s Judgments 187 

they be, not the resources of Love, but the thunder- 
bolts of dire and almighty Vengeance — is there not 
something very ghastly in Christians, commanded 
by the Christ to be pitiful and merciful, singing 
about them ? Can there, for example, be any- 
thing more unsuitable for song than that embodied 
in the words of a hymn which thousands have 
sung — 

" There is a dreadful hell, 
And never-ending pains ; 
Where sinners must with devils dwell 
In darkness, fire and chains." 

The Christians who believe that, ought not to 
sing about it. They ought to speak of it with 
bated breath and with horror on their faces and 
tears in their eyes. And yet the Psalmist saw no 
incompatibility in singing about judgment, as well 
as mercy. 

Again, in the light of what has been taught con- 
cerning God's judgments, can any Christian man or 
woman have a longing for those judgments "at all 
times"; believing that some of them, at all events, 
will involve the utter ruin of human souls ? And 
yet the Psalmist could say that his soul " breaketh 
for the longing of them." If any supporter of the 
" eternal punishment " theory, convinced, of course, 



188 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

that God's judgments will fall not on him but on 
others, should tell us his soul was longing for them 
—we should reply— "Sir, your theology has be- 
numbed your moral sensibilities. The Christ, of 
whose Spirit you are supposed to drink, once 
wept over a sinful city because He foresaw that 
forty years later temporal judgments would fall 
upon it. Are you so dead to pity as to long for that 
which, according to your cruel creed, will consign 
untold millions into irretrievable misery ? " 

Again, in the light of what has been taught con- 
cerning God's judgments, how can any one offer 
the Psalmist's prayer — "Let Thy judgments help 
me " ? The doctrine propounded has been — (a) 
That God's judgments are His punishment of sin- 
ners, not to restore, but to condemn them. Many 
are intensely shocked at being told that Sihon, King 
of the Amorites, and Og, the King of Bashan, were 
slain "because God's mercy endureth forever" 
(Ps. 136: 19, 20). They have no conception of a 
judgment that can be a mercy to the one upon 
whom it falls, (b) That upon believers no judg- 
ments of God fall. 

Well, we repudiate this doctrine in both these 
points, on two grounds. First, we believe, on the 
basis of what the Bible declares, that none of God's 



Oar Hope in God's Judgments 189 

judgments are intended to destroy, but to save; and 
next, we also believe that no Christian, any more 
than another person, is exempt from judgment. 
Christ's saving of us is not, as so many have sup- 
posed, a suspension of God's great law of judg- 
ment in regard to us, simply because as Christians 
we have accepted certain Articles of Belief. It is a 
salvation which saves us into such a moral and 
spiritual condition as to make it unnecessary that 
some of the severer judgments of God which fall 
upon others should fall upon us. It is not true, as 
we are sometimes told by a certain class of teach- 
ers, that at one moment a person, because he is not 
a believer, is exposed to the direst judgments of 
God, and the next moment because he assents to 
certain doctrines, is entitled to immunity from 
them. No faith on our part secures us from the 
judgments of God, except by leading us to become 
of such a character and spiritual tone as not to re- 
quire the disciplinings of judgment. The Christian 
man who lives badly and shapes his character 
wrongly, v/ill not, on account of his religious ideas, 
escape the judgments of God. The Gospel of Jesus 
does not upset the eternal law of God's universe — 
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap." A life lived in the perfecting strength 



190 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

drawn from the saving Christ will have to face no 
experiences of the "darkness without," and the 
"age-long pruning," and "the weeping and wail- 
ing and gnashing of teeth"; but there are other 
judgments which, like these, are instruments in the 
hands of God for the soul's betterment. The 
Christian may have to face some of these before his 
spirit shall stand " perfect and entire, wanting noth- 
ing." It was with a thought such as this that the 
Psalmist could pray — "Let Thy judgments help 
me." 

We have seen, then, how by altering our con- 
ception of the nature of God's judgments, we may 
fear them and yet hope in them. Dark and fearful 
as is that cloud of judgment which must hang over 
every human soul that is not making for righteous- 
ness, we can see behind it the boundless and un- 
fathomable expanse of Divine mercy. "Thy 
mercy," exclaims the Psalmist, "is great above 
the heavens." With a faith in the resourcefulness 
of God, far grander than that which has character- 
ized the common belief of Christendom, he could 
see that even the severities of God are the outcome 
of Love. Goodness and righteousness must ulti- 
mately triumph in His universe. No devil as 
powerful as God, or, according to some, more 



Oar Hope in God's Judgments 191 

powerful than He, will share with Him the honors 
of empire. God may have to put down evil with 
"a strong arm and an outstretched hand," but He 
will do it. His judgments may fall on souls before 
the stubborn wills be bent; and the fire of His 
painful discipline may burn unquenchably before 
the chaff of moral worthlessness be burned up in us; 
but, depend upon it, the God will triumph. He 
has said He will. By mercy, or by judgment, He 
will prevail. Is it not that which the Psalmist 
meant in those words — ''Judgment shall return 
unto righteousness" (Ps. 94: 15) ? 

Unfortunately, the Christianity of the Western 
Church has lost this splendid conception of the 
meaning of God's judgments. The early Eastern 
Church believed it, but as the teachings of Jesus 
came into contact with the ideas and instincts of 
the exclusive, cruel and loveless Latin race, it was 
no longer believed. Only beings of Love can per- 
ceive Divine Love. Thank God ! the Christian 
Church is beginning to recover this lost truth con- 
cerning the remedial character of God's judgments. 
It is the key by which alone we can understand the 
Bible. Take it out of the Bible (as men have done 
to suit their theologies), and the whole Book be- 
comes full of hopeless contradictions. Read it 



192 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

there, and the Gospel, indeed, becomes good news 
— the grandest message of a God of Love and 
Mercy to His sinful creatures. Even in His dispen- 
sations of severity we can hope. The thunderclaps 
of judgment are but the expedient of a Father-God 
to fling into sharper contrast the solemn silence 
that follows, from out of which "the still, small 
voice " of Love will speak. 

The Psalmist was afraid of God's judgments. 
They are very real, and may be very terrible ex- 
periences. Many of those Christians who endorse 
the doctrine embodied in that fearful hymn we 
quoted, charge us, who shudder at so slandering 
God, with teaching that there will be little or no 
judgment of God on sin. They tell us our teaching 
removes the wholesome restraint of fear; that men 
will be indifferent as to how they live, if they be- 
lieve that ultimately all will be saved. I know 
many clergymen who are Universalists, who would 
not proclaim their belief on any account, for the 
reason just stated. It might encourage men to con- 
tinue in sin and irreligion, they think. To them 
we say — "If Universalism be truth, you ought to 
teach it openly and fearlessly. If the threatened 
judgments of God will not deter men from sin, no 
exaggerated representation of those judgments will 



Oar Hope in God's Judgments 193 

do so." Tell men that the judgments of God are 
very real and very sure, and of such a character 
that a reasonable person can believe in them; and 
they will fear them. Tell men, on the other hand, 
that those judgments are so unutterably horrible, 
revolting and unjust, as to outrage every concep- 
tion of goodness and mercy, and they will not 
believe in them; and consequently they become 
no deterrent from sin. Nor need we be surprised. 
If you, as a father, tell your little child that you 
love him with a great unchanging love, and then 
in the next breath inform him that if he is naughty 
and disobedient, you will most certainly burn him 
alive for the rest of his life — well, he does not 
believe you — does he ? He would be a silly little 
child, if he did; and you would be a curiously 
inconsistent father. Yet that is the way in which 
Christian teachers in the past have placed the great 
Father-God before men. "He loves you," they 
have said, "with an infinite and unchangeable love; 
all the love in the world is but as a drop in the 
ocean in comparison with His love for you; but if 
you do wrong, and do not love Him, He will con- 
sign you to everlasting misery." Well, of course, 
the men and women who reason at all do not 
believe this. If what they have been told about 



194 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

His love be true, they have enough sense to per- 
ceive that what they have been told concerning His 
remorseless judgment must be untrue. To love 
such an inconsistent Being is an impossibility to 
them, and so they go on in their sin and irreligion. 
The preacher of such a doctrine has frustrated his 
aim. His exaggeration in respect to the Father's 
judgments, instead of developing a rightful fear, 
has removed it. The threatenings are considered 
too unreasonable and atrocious ever to be fulfilled. 
To go back to our illustration of the earthly father 
and the naughty boy. Suppose with calm and 
angerless face, and perhaps, with the tears in your 
eyes, you tell your child his disobedience and 
naughtiness must be followed by punishment and 
discipline — severe it may be— for his good. Sup- 
pose you tell him that to punish him hurts you; 
that it is not your anger nor hatred of him that 
makes you punish him; but your strong, unchang- 
ing love that cannot be satisfied unless he be good 
and happy. Oh! he will believe you then. Your 
threatenings are reasonable; they appeal to his 
sense of right. 

Now we who believe both sets of statements in 
the Bible — those which tell us about the enduring 
Love of God, as well as those which tell us that 



Oar Hope in God's Judgments 195 

God will triumph over evil, and not that evil will 
triumph over God, — say to men and women, not 
that they have no cause to fear the judgments of 
God because in their character they are remedial. 
We do not tell them that it does not very much 
matter what they are, and what kind of life they 
may lead, because all will come right at last. No, 
the teachers of the old-fashioned theology do this, 
by telling men that they may evade all the Divine 
judgments, and escape all the consequences of a 
wicked and misspent life, by a death-bed repent- 
ance. We say, that men must, if they be sensible, 
fear the judgments of God; that those judgments 
are very real and very sure; that it is an unalter- 
able law in God's universe that beings must reap 
as they have sown; and that no mere acceptance 
of religious views will enable us to sow badly and 
reap well. "There is no condemnation to them 
which are in Christ Jesus" — say our friends who 
differ from us on this subject, and generally forget 
to quote the rest of the passage — " who walk after 
the Spirit." "Quite true," we rejoin, "there can 
be no ordering of God that is characterized by 
condemnation in regard to any soul, who by the 
leading of the Christ-life is making for the goal of 
Salvation ; but that does not do away with the fact 



196 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

that the judgments of God come to every soul — 
Christian or otherwise." 

To the godless and sinful we say — "Be afraid; 
aye be terribly afraid of those judgments of God." 
They are not the acts of an irate Despot, furious 
that we have dared to set ourselves against His 
eternal law of righteousness. They are the calm, 
deliberate, angerless expedients of a Being of Love 
to bring us to blessedness and right. They are all 
the more to be feared because of that. There is a 
sorrow at the heart of the great All-Father, as He 
says to us, the creatures whom He loves — "For 
your sake I must judge; for your sake I must 
punish; and i or your sake My law of consequences 
must be enforced. You may compel Me, by what 
you do, and by what you make yourself, to pass 
you through the ordeal of discipline and painful 
pruning, before I can bring you to Myself. On 
you; on the way you dispose your will, shape 
your character, and order your life — it must depend 
whether I save you by the gentle measures of 
grace, or by the severities of judgment; by the 
means that Infinite Love delights in, or by those 
means in which Infinite Love does not delight — the 
"saving so as by fire." 

Depend upon it, if this reasonable, believable 



Oar Hope in God's Judgments 197 

view of the judgments of God will not sober men 
to live rightly and serve God, no doctrine of a 
hideous and impossible everlasting hell will do so. 
This latter doctrine, because it is so outrageously 
appalling and unjust, may cause men to have no 
fear at all of God's judgments, and may, con- 
sequently, confirm them in their indifference and 
unbelief; it may drive weak-minded ones — as it 
has done — to religious hysteria and the madhouse; 
and it may breed in certain minds that sense of 
self-interest which deadens the perceptions of 
others' sufferings and others' wrongs; but it will 
never create in any thoughtful soul anything but 
that worst of all demoralizing and paralyzing feel- 
ings—the fear, not of a Father who punishes to bless, 
but of a despot who punishes to curse and to ruin. 
Oh! no; it is just because we believe so intensely 
the statement of Jesus that " God so loved the 
world," that we say to those who are sinful and 
irreligious— " Be afraid of the judgments of our 
God. They are the severe and ultimate resources 
of a Love that will not be baffled. That Love 
will be unsatisfied until it has saved you into 
wholeness and perfection. Our God is 'a Con- 
suming Fire.' His Love for the souls of men 
demands that the dross and chaff in them shall be 



198 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

burned up. Strong and awful may be the stroke 
of judgment on you, if you make it needful, be- 
cause strong and awful is the Love that must save." 
"I am afraid of Thy judgments," said the old- 
world singer. Yes, and we who have caught the 
echo of the words spoken by the meek and for- 
bearing Saviour when He walked this earth, may 
take up the cry. He it was, who has told us that 
there is for souls, who have fashioned it for them- 
selves, a "darkness without," a "Gehenna of the 
fire" of mental pain and remorse, "a weeping and 
a wailing and a gnashing of teeth," and a binding 
hand and foot of the unadorned spirit. He it was, 
who spoke about the alienation, the loneliness, the 
wretchedness, the beggary, the hunger, the swine 
and the husks for the unarisen prodigals who have 
severed themselves from the good Father. 

Yes, we have to remember this — to remember 
that our experiences Behind the Veil must answer 
to how we have been thinking, feeling and acting 
here. God's judgments come upon all — upon the 
Christian and non-Christian. They constitute His 
great and inviolable law of consequences; but 
those consequences, because they are the orderings 
of a Being who loves us, are pregnant with pos- 
sibilities of recovery and blessing. 



Our Hope in God's Judgments 199 

That leads us to the last point of our subject — our 
hope in the judgments of God. "I have hoped in 
Thy judgments," said the Psalmist. The words, 
although spoken by one who was living only in 
the twilight of revelation, invest the Gospel of God 
with enhanced glory. That which is so often 
preached as "Gospel," has not a glimmer of an 
idea of any hope in God's judgments — at all events 
as far as judgments after death are concerned. It 
is "good news" for some, if they regard only 
themselves, and think not about the lost. It is 
no good news for the many. 

" As a man lives, so shall he die ; 
As a man dies, so shall he be 
All through the days of eternity " — 

were the words which a better conception of God 
and His Purpose of mercy has expunged from a 
well-known hymn-book. 

Well, of course, if we can entertain no hope in 
respect to God's judgments on sinners after death, 
the statement, that a man will be all through the 
days of eternity what he is when he departs 
this life — is true. If the old idea be correct, there 
is no Gospel for any except a very small proportion 
of the human race. The unsaved ones die; and 



200 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

they are loved by God no longer. They are kept 
in waiting in Another World in prolonged dread 
of a judgment, which, when it shall come, will seal 
their doom forever as lost souls. There is no 
hope in such a view of God's judgment — is there ? 
And yet the Psalmist could say — " I have hoped in 
Thy judgments." How could he do that, we ask 
— if judgment mean only blank, awful hopeless- 
ness for such souls ? 

How are we then to solve the difficulty that thus 
presents itself ? There is no way of doing so, other 
than by regarding the judgments of God as remedial 
processes by which He works to save those crea- 
tures, whom, in spite of all their sinfulness and 
waywardness, He still loves. 

The good earthly father only punishes his child to 
bless. Will the Heavenly Father's punishments be 
but the manifestations of implacable anger and de- 
structive wrath in regard to any soul here or here- 
after, whom an Apostle has described as " His off- 
spring" (Acts 17:28)? We think not. An im- 
perfectly translated Bible has appeared to some to 
countenance such an idea; but a right understanding 
of the Scriptures removes the God-dishonoring no- 
tion. The truth about the remedial character of 
God's judgments brings hundreds of statements in 



Oar Hope in God' s Judgments 201 

the Word of God as to His dealings with sinners, 
into agreement with those other glorious statements 
which speak of the all-embraciveness of His Pur- 
pose of Salvation. 

Without the recognition of this truth, it is impos- 
sible to reconcile the two classes of statements. 
The belief that God's judgments are not means to 
bless but to curse, shuts out the belief that the liv- 
ing God " is the Saviour of all men " (1 Tim. 4: 10), 
and that at the end He will be " all things in all be- 
ings " (rd ndvTa £v Kaaiv — J Cor. 15: 28). 

No; when we can think of the judgments of God 
in the way we have indicated, Religion becomes a 
believable thing. The Bible presents itself to us 
with none of the contradictions which are presented 
to those who differ from us. The living God is 
" the Saviour of all men "; He will be " all in all "; 
and His judgments — severe and awful as they may 
be for some who resist His Purpose, are but a means 
to Salvation. A celestial light — the light of invinci- 
ble Love — gleams brightly on those judgments. 
The " everlasting punishment " of the Romanist and 
the Revivalist becomes the "age-long pruning, or 
disciplining " of the rightly-translated New Testa- 
ment. The " Gehenna of fire" becomes, not a tor- 
ture-chamber in which a God of Infinite Love will 



202 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

aimlessly ill-treat His children forever and ever, 
but a merciful ordering whereby the worthlessness 
in us may be consumed. The " weeping and the 
wailing" become not the futile agony of unending 
woe, not the everlasting reproach on God that He 
ever allowed lost ones to come into being; but the 
tears that shall presently melt the hardened and 
stubborn heart, and the cry that shall later resolve 
itself into a prayer for pardon and recovery. The 
"darkness without" is not (as pictured by the 
Medievalists) that Cimmerian blackness, unillumined 
by even one tiny, twinkling star of hope, but the 
soul's midnight — awful as it may be — in which the 
spirit-man, by that very experience, shall learn to 
want the brightness and his God. 

The experiences of the prodigal — his shame, his 
hunger and his rags — were not the attestations that 
he had "played the wicked fool," and so had irre- 
trievably lost the father's bosom and the father's 
home; they were but the means that brought 
him "to himself," and restored him to his father's 
arms. 

With such thoughts as these, we project our mind 
to the grand future. 

"The end" of the ages, through which God has 
been working out His magnificent project of saving, 



Oar Hope in God's Judgments 203 

has come. The "aeon of the aeons" (as St. Paul 
put it) has dawned. 

Men's self-manufactured hells have disappeared. 
The darkness, the soul's insensibility to God — (the 
"death all through an aeon" — as Jesus called it — 
John 8: 52), the pruning, the tears, the painful dis- 
ciplinings and the sin have all " passed away." 

The judgments of the Father-God of Love have 
worked for His Purpose. Evil is no more. The 
last discordant note has been silenced in a Uni- 
verse of Order. God has triumphed gloriously all 
along the lines, as Psalmist, and prophet and poet 
and seer and His Christ said He would. 

See! every knee is bowing to Him and every 
heart is loving Him. 

The " Restitution of all things " has come. The 
God is "all in all." 

Yes, and not before the Christian Church has en- 
larged her ideas of the omnipotence of a God who 
is Love, and fixed the eye of her faith upon this 
consummating " aeon of the aeons " — will she be 
able to say — "I have hoped in Thy judgments." 



CHAPTER IX 

" EXCELSIOR " 

'Let us . . . press on unto full-growth." — Heb. 6:1. 

The writer of this exhortation has defined in a 
short sentence what is the end of our Religion, and 
what must be our mental and spiritual attitude in 
regard to that end. Full-growth is the goal as- 
signed to Christians by virtue of their connection 
with a saving Christ; and a pressing, or bearing of 
themselves strenuously toward that {fipwiitda &T), 
is to be their attitude. 

Everything else in connection with Religion must 
be regarded as no more than means to this great 
end. Repentance, faith, ordinances and doctrines — 
all very good and helpful — are but the stepping- 
stones by which we mount to something better. 

The writer makes this very clear in the context of 
this passage. He writes — "Wherefore, having 
ceased to speak about the matter of the first prin- 
ciples of Christ (i. e., the foundation-truths — the 
A B C — of the Gospel), let us press on unto full- 
growth; not continually laying again a foundation 



"Excelsior" 205 

— viz., that of repentance from dead works, and of 
faith toward God, of the teaching of baptisms and 
of laying on of hands, and of the advancement 
(anastasis) of the dead, and of age-long judgment." 
His idea is that the Christian must not stand still. 
He must not imagine that, as soon as he has re- 
pented and exercised faith, all the work connected 
with his salvation has been accomplished. He 
must not suppose, as many have done, that when a 
person has merely believed, he is immediately ripe 
for heaven and immortal blessedness. He is to 
press on to something more. Salvation involves 
wholeness, soundness and full-growth. No one is 
saved on his repenting and believing. Those acts 
bring him into a "state of salvation," as the Cate- 
chism puts it; but no more. They do not trans- 
port him to the goal of salvation — Perfection. 

They turn a man's face Godward; but they do 
not cause him at once to blossom into Godlikeness. 
When we have repented and believed, there re- 
mains a very great deal concerning Divine truth for 
us to learn, and a very great deal in the way of 
spiritual grace for us to acquire. Repentance and 
faith will not have effected their purpose, unless 
they made us conscious, not that our salvation has 
been accomplished, but that before us lies a great 



206 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

mountain of moral and spiritual excellence to 
whose summit we must climb. The "first prin- 
ciples " of the Gospel place us at the foot of that 
mountain, and dispose us rightly for the climbing; 
but we must not stay at the point at which they 
place us. We must progress in spiritual knowl- 
edge and excellency, if we would reach the summit 
and obtain salvation. Through the earth-life and 
beyond it, our motto must be "Excelsior" — higher 
in regard to our knowledge of God and Divine 
things; higher in regard to our character and 
spiritual nature. Mere repentance and faith and 
acquiescence in doctrines will never constitute any 
one a saved soul; they are but the foundations upon 
which the finished temple of our moral being can 
be reared. From the " rudiments" of his religious 
experience the Christian must pass on to higher 
developments of mind and character. From the 
Gospel-alphabet he must advance to the "deeper 
things " of God. 

It may be, our Master Christ was thinking of this 
when He bade us in regard to spiritual matters 
" become as a little child." 

Here is a little one who has set himself to acquire 
the ability to read. See how he goes about it. He 
starts, of course, at the alphabet, and first masters 



44 Excelsior" 207 

that. That being done, he proceeds to words of 
one, two or more syllables. He has learned some- 
thing, and he wants to know more. The little 
fellow never imagines that, because he knows the 
alphabet perfectly, he has nothing more to learn. 

His mere knowledge of words does not satisfy 
him. He must go on. He must acquire that 
greater knowledge of the significance of words. 
The more he learns the more conscious does he 
become of how much there still remains for him to 
learn. He presses on toward the goal of full- 
growth in regard to knowledge. He means one 
day to become an accomplished scholar, and so he 
works for the end. 

All that is very sensible and right. 

Now, there are many Christians who would do 
well to imitate the little child. We refer to those 
persons who in regard to knowledge of Divine 
things and character make little or no headway. 
They remain, mentally and morally, stationary at 
that point at which repentance and belief placed 
them years ago. They possess no better concep- 
tions of God and truth than they had then, nor 
does their character exhibit those refinements and 
graces which the Christian life is intended to 
develop. In respect neither to mind nor to spirit is 



208 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

there any indication of a pressing on unto full- 
growth. Others obtain brighter and worthier ideas 
of God and religion; they do not. Others, not half 
so religiously punctilious as they, manifest a moral 
gracefulness and sweetness of disposition which 
they do not. We ask — Why is this? It cannot be 
on account of any insincerity as to their religion. 
The ones to whom we refer are generally very 
sincere. Then why is it they make no advance in 
the direction of mental and moral full-growth ? 
The answer is — "Excelsior" is not the motto on 
the banner around which they rally themselves. 
They are unlike the little child. They get as far as 
the Gospel alphabet and go no farther. They count 
the "first principles" of the Gospel as the all of it. 
They have learned — not always very well — the 
primary truths of Religion, and suppose there is 
nothing more to learn, on this side of the veil, at all 
events. They are terribly shocked at being told 
that there are magnificent truths in the Bible, 
which, by reason of theological dullness and in- 
correct translations, the Christians of past centuries 
have overlooked. They forget that God's law is to 
vouchsafe His revelations of truth as men's minds be- 
come attuned to receive them. They forget that the 
very utterances of the Saviour Himself have been 



"Excelsior" 209 

twisted into contradictoriness and horror by the 
interpretations of teachers read into them. They 
do not remember that the Sacred Book they 
reverence bids them not be satisfied with the 
" rudiments " of Divine knowledge, but to press on 
toward fuller enlightenment. Then, again, those 
persons who get no farther than the Gospel 
alphabet suppose that the acts of repenting and 
believing settle everything in regard to their sal- 
vation. The development and perfecting of their 
character is a work with which, in reality, they 
have very little to do. It is God's work. By a 
miracle of grace, as a reward to them for having 
repented and believed, He will transform them into 
perfected beings immediately they leave this life. 
Nay more, some of them will even go the length of 
saying that, by virtue of their faith, God already 
accounts them, in spite of all their imperfection and 
undevelopment, as perfect beings. 

Well, of course, such an undue exaltation of the 
" first principles " of the Gospel is fatal to the put- 
ting forth of strenuous effort to acquire moral 
excellence. The man who supposes that his re- 
pentance and faith guarantee him spiritual and 
moral perfection as soon as he passes from this 
world, will not be so likely as one who thinks 



210 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

otherwise to "work out his own salvation with fear 
and trembling" (Phil. 2: 12). The saving work of 
Jesus is the work of raising a spirit into Godlikeness. 
It is a difficult work, a long work, and a work of 
many stages. It is a work in which the one to be 
saved must co-operate with God. God will work in 
him, but he himself must " work out his own sal- 
vation." We may liken Christ's saving work to a 
ladder of many rungs, of which the topmost one is 
Perfection. Step by step, in this world and Beyond, 
every rung of that ladder must be trodden by us. 
Repentance and faith plant us only on the first rung. 
We must mount upward. There are any number 
of moral imperfections to be eradicated; any num- 
ber of graces to be called into existence and 
developed. The ladder is a long one and each 
ascending rung lifts us nearer to God. The old- 
time teacher was right — there must be no stopping 
at the first rung; the A B C of Religion must be left 
behind; we must make for the higher and the gaol. 

Let us consider a little more closely the words: 
" Press on unto full-growth." 

I. — The end of Christ's saving work is to make 
us perfect beings. The term " full-growth " implies 
Perfection. 

It is the telling of men that this is the Purpose of 



"Excelsior" 211 

God in regard to the human race, which constitutes 
the "good news" of the Gospel. It is not at all 
" good news" to be told that all human beings are 
so brought into existence by a good God, that they 
must inevitably pass to a doom of everlasting 
horror, unless He interpose to rescue them. It is 
not at all "good news" to learn that the Christ, in 
spite of all that He wishes, and said He would do, 
will only in the end save some, and that the many 
will be irretrievably consigned to a hell which has 
been prepared for them. To us, such teaching ex- 
hibits no characteristic of Gospel. As thoughtful 
persons, touched by the miseries of others — we ask 
— Would not it have been infinitely better that the 
human race should not have been permitted to come 
into existence at all, than that any should face such 
an awful experience ? But thank God, such views 
are neither in accordance with the teaching of the 
Saviour Christ, nor with reason and the principles 
of love and goodness. They are but " the ebullient 
flashes from the glowing caldrons of heated and 
perverted imaginations." 

The Gospel of God is a glorious one. It tells men 
that they are all "the offspring of God," that all 
were made to be saved, and none to be hopelessly 
damned. It tells them of a Christ who is " the Sa- 



212 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

viour of all men," of a grace that flows from Him 
that can save them from, and out of, the mental, 
moral and spiritual hells which here and elsewhere 
they make for themselves. It tells them that every 
human soul was made to be perfected; that rescue 
from evil and its consequences is a concomitant of 
salvation, but not the main purpose of it; that the 
work of "the Saviour of all men" is to make all 
men " perfect and entire, wanting nothing " (James 
i : 4). The Saviour, Himself, stated that this is the 
end of the Salvation which He came to bestow upon 
men. He defined His Gospel in one sentence, 
spoken in that Sermon on the Mount — "Ye there- 
fore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is per- 
fect" (Matt. 5: 48). This promise of Jesus is a 
tremendous one; and yet it is the point to which 
the Salvation of God is pledged to conduct us. It 
is characteristic of the soaring nature of redemptive 
work. It denotes the "height" of the love of 
Jesus. Divine Love, as it has its source in God, and 
manifests itself in the Person of the Saviour, con- 
templates not merely the making of us pardoned 
beings in relation to One who is the Upholder of 
righteousness in His universe. It works not merely 
for our deliverance from the bitter and awful con- 
sequences which must ensue, if evil run its unar- 



"Excelsior" 213 

rested course in us. It will not be content with 
obliterating the blots and stains and imperfections 
connected with our moral being. It is aspiring. It 
has its " height" of purpose. It will not be satis- 
fied, until it shall have fashioned us into beings of 
perfection ; beings who shall have arrived at full- 
growth, mentally and morally. 

This Purpose of Divine Love in regard to us is so 
lofty, that were it not for the possibilities of Another 
life we should account it unattainable. The noblest 
of men and women, if Death determines the meas- 
ure of what they are capable, could never reach that 
goal. Our goodness is so feeble, our tendency to 
develop the imperfect rather than the perfect is so 
predominant; our earthly life is so short, and we are 
all so undeveloped when we arrive at the end of it, 
that were it not for the thought of continued prog- 
ress after death, we should have to say — "The 
height of Christ's redemptive love is too high, too 
infinitely soaring, for us ever to reach unto it." 
And yet the Saviour meant what He said in that 
magnificent promise He gave. "Ye shall be per- 
fect"; and there is nothing ultra-optimistic and 
transcendental in the words we are considering — 
" Let us press on unto full-growth." Take this ex- 
hortation as it bears — 



214 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

II. — Upon the development of character. 

We place that first, for the reason that the Christ 
always did so. In His teaching, as recorded in the 
Gospels, we find Him laying far more stress upon 
the way in which a man lives than upon what he 
thinks. He never threatened persons with an age- 
long judgment, or pruning, for the theological mis- 
takes they might make; but he did threaten them 
with that, as a consequence of bad character and 
wrong-doing. Jesus said — " He that keepeth My 
commandments, he it is that loveth Me." 

His reason for emphasizing the importance of de- 
veloping the character is manifest. There can be 
no attainment of full-growth in the knowledge of 
Divine things apart from full-growth in respect to 
character. Our Saviour Christ proclaimed that truth 
in the words — "Blessed are the pure in heart for 
they shall perceive God," and " If any man will do 
His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it 
be of God." The two things — development of 
character, and development of knowledge in regard 
to Divine truth, stand in the relationship of cause 
and effect. The one in whom the Christ-graces of 
love, tenderness and pitifulness are not energizing 
will not perceive the truth about God and His Gos- 
pel. Men, in their conceptions of God, fashion Him 



"Excelsior" 215 

like unto themselves. The old-time champions of 
"orthodoxy," who had so little love in their con- 
stitution as to be able to complacently contemplate 
the certainty that the bulk of their fellow creatures 
would be tortured forever, mentally manufactured a 
deity who was as loveless and pitiless as them- 
selves. Mary, queen of England, when asked 
whether she did not think it inconsistent with the 
principles of Christ's Religion to burn heretics at 
the stake, replied, — " How can it be wrong for me 
to burn them for a few minutes, when God, Him- 
self, will burn them forever and ever.'' There is 
but one way by which we may rise to a perfect 
knowledge of God. It lies along the King's high- 
way of noble and Christlike character. Be loving 
and merciful and pitiful and concernful for others, 
and then, and only then, will you be able to per- 
ceive God as a Father-God, invested with these 
glorious attributes. Thus we see how right the 
Christ was when He bade men to strive first for 
full-growth in character, in order that they might 
come to full-growth in Divine Knowledge. 

It may be that none of us sufficiently realize 
this intimate relationship between our character 
and our perception of truth. "The pure in heart 
shall perceive God." With some of us, there may 



216 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

be something akin to a contentment to go on in 
our life, with many of the Divine graces of char- 
acter undeveloped, or but little developed. God 
presents some of the higher revealments of truth 
to us, and we cannot receive them. They do not 
appeal to us. Our undeveloped moral constitution 
does not respond to them. There are weak 
points in our character. An undercurrent of 
selfishness runs through our religion and our 
actions. We are bad-tempered, inconsiderate in 
regard to others, ungentle, brusque, and ''honestly 
blunt " (as we euphemistically term it). We are 
resentful, uncharitable, unforgiving, intolerant, 
exclusive, self-satisfied and top-heavy with our 
social and religious respectability. Sometimes 
the consciousness of these defects and imper- 
fections in our character disturbs us; but not 
very much. We cling to our Religion; stand 
staunch to its "first principles," but make no 
progress toward moral perfection. It will all 
come right, we think, when we go out of this 
life, and God takes us to His heaven. All our 
selfishness, our bad-temper, our unlovingness; all 
the freckles, the pimples, the warps and twists of 
our moral being will disappear then, because of 
our repentance and because of our faith. But stay! 



"Excelsior" 217 

It will not all come right, if we depart from this 
life in that condition; and it is not true that God 
will take us to His heaven. There are no un- 
developed creatures in heaven. Christ's Salvation 
is no Divine expedient for giving unqualified per- 
sons a passport to the celestial world. Christ is 
"made unto us righteousness," not in the sense in 
which some have supposed, viz., that a metaphor- 
ical robe of His moral excellencies is flung over us 
in such a way as to hide our moral deficiencies 
from the sight of God. Christ is not made unto 
us righteousness, until by the power of saving 
grace His own magnificent character has been 
formed in us. It is " Christ in you," wrote St. 
Paul, "which is the hope of glory." 

Oh! we do well to remember this; we do well 
to remember that our life Beyond the Veil will 
start at the precise point of moral and spiritual 
quality reached by us here. Nothing will dis- 
pense us from the consequences of not having 
pressed on toward moral development. We may 
have been regular churchgoers; we may have 
subscribed to all the Articles of the Christian 
Creed, and have believed everything to the 
"Amen"; but if over and above our repentance 
and faith there has been no making for moral 



218 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

and spiritual full-growth, it will not be right for 
us as we pass hence. Christ's work of saving us 
will have been arrested. The microbes of moral 
disease which we took no pains to discover and 
expel from our character, may, unknown to 
ourselves, have been growing into spiritual 
cancers. The Christ who saves us must save 
us into wholeness and soundness. In the Life 
to come, He will, assuredly, have to use the 
knife of painful discipline, before His work of 
perfecting can be accomplished. Our past neglect 
in the development of character will make it 
infinitely harder for us in the world of Spirit to 
mount the Gospel ladder. That is why the 
Saviour laid so much stress upon right living. 
That is why the writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews said— "Let us press on unto full- 
growth." How is it with us? Is our Religion 
the mere outcome of a fear of those bitter 
experiences which must come upon every soul 
that lives in non-adjustment to its true environ- 
ment — God ? Or, is it that mighty Principle, sym- 
bolized by the word "Excelsior," that makes us 
ever hoping for, ever praying for, and ever striving 
after the better, the nobler, and the perfect in 
moral grace and beauty ? We best understand 



"Excelsior" 219 

the true Gospel of Jesus when we grasp the im- 
port of the poet's words, — 

" Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, 
Is our destined end or way ; 
But to act, that each to-morrow 
Find us farther than to-day." 

It is then, and only then, that we can answer to 
our "high calling of God in Christ Jesus"; and 
it is only when the human spirit shall have at- 
tained full-growth in goodness, that it shall be 
able to perceive the full truth concerning God, His 
character and His purposes. 

III. — The exhortation — " Press on unto full- 
growth " — bears upon the development of mind. 

It is startling to some good persons to be told 
that we do not know, and the Church does not 
know, the whole of the truth about God and His 
Purposes in regard to the human race. It is still 
more startling to them to be told that, as the years 
roll on, the Bible itself will be much better under- 
stood than it has been; and that many glorious 
truths revealed therein, known to the early Church, 
but lost sight of afterward, will be recovered, as 
the obscurations of Medievalism are one by one 
cleared away. 



220 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

Men, in the past, have taken the glorious, cm- 
bracive Gospel of God and have tried to squeeze 
it into the tiny mould of their own undeveloped 
moral conceptions. They have gauged that Gospel 
by the standard of their own nature. They have 
been narrow and exclusive and loveless in their 
disposition, and the Gospel as it has passed to the 
world through them has received the impress of 
their character. Nor is this all. It has been sup- 
posed that no advance in regard to the knowledge 
of Divine truth can possibly be made on what has 
been authoritatively defined as being the truth; and 
so the claim of infallibility and full-enlightenment 
has been set up for Popes and Councils and Church 
Fathers and others. In a word, the attempt has 
been made, and is now being made, to thwart the 
growth of the Christian mind, by placing before it 
as final the pronouncements of men who lived cen- 
turies ago, and of saying — "Thus far shalt thou go; 
but no farther." The attempt has not succeeded, 
and in the very nature of things it cannot succeed. 
The moral principles of the teaching of Jesus are 
leavening Society to-day in a way in which they 
have not leavened Society in the past. The civilized 
world of the present, in spite of its irreligion and 
wickedness, is more humane, more pitiful, and 



"Excelsior" 221 

more considerate for the wrongs and sufferings 
of others than it was in the past. Injustice and 
cruelty are denounced by every newspaper in the 
land; hundreds of millions of pounds are annually 
spent to ameliorate the condition of the diseased, 
the fallen and the outcast; while the idea is fast 
gaining acceptance that no civil punishment of the 
wrong-doer is justifiable that has not in view the 
reformation and ultimate recovery of the offender. 

All this movement on the part of mankind to 
truer and nobler ideas of moral goodness, has had 
an enormous effect upon Theology. It has led men 
to reconsider what has been taught as to God, His 
character and His purposes. It has caused hun- 
dreds of thousands of thoughtful ones to come to 
worthier ideas of Him and His Gospel. We can 
no longer believe in a God whose mercy is never 
to reach the great majority of His creatures. We 
can no longer regard His judgments as agents to 
curse and not to bless. We can no longer prostrate 
ourselves before Him in worship and adoration, 
and think that behind the Alleluias of heaven will 
echo the awful, everlasting wail of the myriad lost, 
for whom He has ceased to be concerned. 

No, the improvement of this age, in moral tone 
as contrasted with the tone of preceding ages, has 



222 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

caused men to press on to a fuller growth in 
Divine knowledge. We have the same Bible, as 
the basis of our knowledge, as men had in the 
past; but we can understand it better than they did. 
Advance in the knowledge of languages, historical 
research and scientific verification of psychic facts 
have swept away many of the crude ideas of the 
past, and flung illumination upon the Sacred Page. 
Hundreds of passages which have hitherto been 
wholly ignored, or twisted into contradiction, by 
men's efforts to reduce them to their own narrow- 
ing conceptions, are now seen to be pregnant with 
glorious significance. 

Yes; but still there is a great deal more in regard 
to God for us to learn. The "first principles" of 
the Gospel will give us enough knowledge of our 
Father-God to make us sure of His Love and His 
Mercy and His Purpose in regard to us. There- 
from we may learn sufficient to place us in a "state 
of salvation," and to put us on the King's highway 
to fuller knowledge. But we must press on; our 
mind as well as our character must grow. "Now 
we see through a glass darkly," wrote the man the 
motto of whose religious life was " Excelsior." "I 
press toward the mark." God's character is very 
different from what it has been represented by 



"Excelsior" 223 

many. His saving Purpose is infinitely grander 
than has been pictured. We cannot, with the ad- 
vance of knowledge, and the fresh light which 
God is vouchsafing to this twentieth century, mould 
our conceptions of Him upon the views held by the 
men of the past. The imperfect notions of one age 
must give place to the better notions of another 
age. Men, as the God-Spirit energizes in them, 
will obtain a better idea of their Father. Jacob was 
a selfish intriguer, and he honestly thought his God 
was a being whom he could bribe. Old-time 
Israelites were men of the sword, and they im- 
agined that Jehovah was a God of war. David, in 
spite of all his true and God-directed instincts, had 
some of the bad qualities of an Oriental despot, and 
so he supposed it would please the Almighty to 
wreak vengeance on his enemies. 

The Churchmen of a past age, who believed in 
"eternal torment," were theologically hard-hearted 
men, and so invented a God of such a character as 
to be pleased at the burning of heretics. We know 
that all these men were wrong in their conceptions 
of God; and we have advanced to better ideas. 
But we must go on. There are heights of Divine 
knowledge to which as yet no human mind has 
soared. The Christ with whom we have linked 



224 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

ourselves has guaranteed us Perfection. Neither in 
respect to mind nor character shall we reach it in 
this world; but "He which hath begun the good 
work in us will perform it until the consummating 
day of Jesus Christ." 

In the meanwhile, a Voice — the Voice of the 
Christ from "far up the height" of the spiritual, 
is calling to us on the lowlands of the Temporal, 
and saying — "Excelsior! Press on unto full- 
growth. Every moral weakness you overcome, 
and every Divine grace you develop, is a step 
upward on that towering mountain of Gospel 
possibility. Excelsior! because the higher your 
moral climbing, the farther will you leave the 
obscuring mists of the valley behind you, and the 
clearer will be your vision of God." 



CHAPTER X 
THE REAL GOSPEL 

" Rejoice with me ; for I have found my sheep which was lost." 
" Rejoice with me ; for I have found the piece which I had lost." 
" Let us eat and be merry ; for this my son was dead, and is 
alive again; he was lost, and is found." — Luke 15 : 6, 9, 23, 24. 

There is no part of our New Testament which so 
magnificently, and yet so simply, sets forth the real 
Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so emphatic- 
ally declares what is the Purpose of God in regard 
to the human race, as this fifteenth chapter of the 
Gospel according to St. Luke. It gives us the ac- 
count of three parables spoken by the Master, in 
which He enlarges upon the great truth expressed 
by St. Paul in those words — "Christ Jesus came 
into the world to save sinners'' (i Tim. 1 : 15), and 
"God is the Saviour of all men" (1 Tim. 4: 10). 
In these stories of the lost sheep, the lost piece of 
money, and the prodigal son, Jesus stripped Relig- 
ion of all the mystification in which the teachers 
had enwrapped it, and in the homeliest manner 
tried to make His hearers understand wherein lay 
the "good news" He came to reveal to mankind, 



226 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

viz., that no one, howsoever lost, is outside the 
concern of Almighty Love; and that there can be no 
lost one who shall not ultimately be found and re- 
stored. That, we venture to say, is the plain and 
logical interpretation of these three parables; and if 
they be stripped of this significance, we are left no 
alternative but to regard them as a hyperbolism 
which expresses much more than the actual truth. 
In other words, these parables either illustrate and 
confirm that other utterance of the Saviour: — "I, if 
I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
unto Me" (John 12: 32), or they constitute an ex- 
aggerated statement in regard to His work and 
power. If Christ's promise to "draw all men" 
unto Himself is to be fulfilled, and if St. Paul's 
statement that " God is the Saviour of all men" be 
true, then the meaning of our Lord's parables must 
be, that ultimately, when God's saving Purpose 
shall have been accomplished, no lost sheep will 
have been left unfound, no lost piece will remain 
unrecovered, and no prodigal will be unrestored. 

This teaching of Jesus is in glorious agreement 
with the Gospel of Universalism; it is hopelessly 
in non-agreement with that past and present 
teaching which men have euphemistically called 
" Gospel." 



The Real Gospel 227 

The Church of Christ, in this present age, is 
slowly, but surely, rising to a better understanding 
of the Gospel as He proclaimed it. The time has 
passed forever for men and women to accept with- 
out question or thought that which may be pre- 
sented to them as Divine truth, simply because it 
bears the stamp of ecclesiastical authority. The 
age of religious credulity is going, and the advance 
of knowledge is making it impossible for men to 
accept as matters of faith anything that does not 
afford scope for the exercise of their mind and 
moral instincts. The time has passed for mankind 
to account as final on the most tremendous of all 
subjects, the character of God and the destiny of 
our race — a few passages of Scriptures shockingly 
mistranslated, and consequently, grievously misun- 
derstood. In an age when persons can read the 
Greek New Testament for themselves, and learning 
is not the monopoly of the Churchmen, they are 
not content to rear the edifice of their belief on the 
interpretations of old-world Fathers, however dis- 
tinguished and revered they may have been. They 
have discovered, with feelings of relief and grati- 
tude, that some of the doctrines which have been 
foisted into the Religion of Jesus, have no better 
foundation than a few texts in the Bible, detached 



228 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

from their context, and made by mistranslation to 
bolster theological preconceptions. Their eyes 
have been opened to the fact that the theology 
which does not teach the full Gospel of God, but 
only offers an attenuated Gospel, is only able to do 
that by treating hundreds of passages in the Bible 
as if they did not exist. Holy Scripture abounds in 
statements which support the Universalist idea; 
but the champions of Western so-called "Ortho- 
doxy," with its doctrine of irretrievably lost souls 
and endless perdition, treat every one of those 
statements as if the word " all" were only "some." 

Once upon a time — from the age of the Apostles 
to about a. d. 300 — the Christian Church believed 
in a Jesus who would save all men; and there was 
no part of the Sacred Writings upon which the 
early Fathers loved to dwell more than upon this 
fifteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. 
Luke. It voiced the real Gospel of God so mag- 
nificently, they thought. It harmonized so grandly 
with the teaching of prophet, poet and Apostle — 
"the restitution of all things." 

Then came the reaction, when the Christian 
Church became theologically exclusive, proud and 
cruel; when all that was embracive in the Gospel 
of Christ was pared away, and men came to regard 



The Real Gospel 2ig 

it as no more than an expedient whereby a few 
might be saved, and the majority lost. The 
shadow of Augustine fell upon the Western 
Church, and it has rested there ever since, ob- 
scuring the Love of God, and constituting Re- 
ligion a dread and a horror to thousands of those 
who think. 

God, the Father of Love, was morally meta- 
morphosed into a merciless being whose purposes 
contemplate the torture of His wretched creatures 
forever and ever. The pitiful Jesus, who told 
His inimitable stories of finding a lost sheep, a 
lost coin, and a lost son, was represented as the 
One who, in spite of all His kindliness and yearn- 
ing, will never in this world or Another find untold 
myriads of lost ones. 

According to the doctrine which even to-day is 
preached in thousands of the churches and chapels 
of Christendom, instead of there coming a time 
when there shall be a grand Hallelujah Chorus 
throughout the Spiritual Universe, because the 
saving Christ has triumphed, and the last lost 
creature of the All-Father has been found; there 
is to be a wail — awful and horrible, because hope- 
less and everlasting — from the ones whom Jesus 
has failed to redeem. 



230 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

That terrible conception has disfigured the 
Christian Religion for sixteen centuries; darken- 
ing Divine truth, slandering God, detracting from 
the glory of Jesus, and driving hundreds of 
thousands of good men and women into the 
gloom and cheerlessness of unbelief. 

Sects and denominations, the most bitter in 
their hostility to the Church of Rome, have clung 
the most tenaciously to this the worst of her 
errors. The English Reformation, which swept 
away some of the accretions piled up upon the 
Gospel of God during the centuries, left the most 
awful of those accretions untouched. 

Romanist, Anglican and Dissenter have joined 
forces in supporting a teaching behind which, as a 
lurid cloud of unspeakable despair and horror, the Sun 
of the great Father's Love has set and disappeared. 

From the "Gospel" according to men and their 
perverted imaginings, we betake ourselves to the 
Gospel of God. We get us back to the purer and 
brighter teaching of the early Eastern Church; to 
those visions of the post-Apostolic Fathers, who 
would have scouted as absurd the supposition that 
God could be ultimately baffled by evil, and had 
no conception of a Christ who should be unable to 
find and save the lost. 



The Real Gospel 231 

We get us back, too, to the Scriptures, casting 
aside all the mistranslation of them, and all the 
misinterpretation which has been the outcome of 
that mistranslation. We betake ourselves to the 
words of the Saviour, as we have, we believe, a 
faithful record of them in the four Gospels. We 
place those four Gospels in the foremost place 
among the writings of the New Testament. 

The ones who penned them were, we believe, 
assisted by the Christ Himself from the Spiritual 
World, to hand down His utterances to the 
centuries. " He (the Holy Ghost)," said Jesus, 
"shall bring all things to your remembrance, 
whatsoever I have said unto you." We believe 
that in the case of St. Matthew and St. John their 
minds were so impressed by thought-waves from 
the Saviour's mind that they were able to remember 
faithfully the words that they themselves had 
heard Him speak. We believe in regard to the 
other two Evangelists, that those from whom 
they obtained the details for their Gospel- 
narratives were similarly assisted by Jesus. Thus 
it is in the four Gospels that we look for the truth 
concerning the Gospel of God. Valuable as the 
Epistles are, we do not rank them with the 
Gospels. The latter contain the statements of 



232 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

Jesus; the former do not. The Gospels give us 
Divine truth as it fell from the lips of the Truth- 
Revealer; the Epistles show us that truth colored 
in many instances by the mental characteristics of 
the men through whose mind it passed. St. Paul's 
Epistle to the Romans is a notable instance of this. 
It proclaims the Gospel; but it is the Gospel clothed 
with Rabbinical ideas. 

If the Christian world had but confined herself 
to the utterances of Jesus, and made all other 
statements of Scripture bend to what He said, 
instead of trying to make His utterances bend to 
that which others wrote, the Gospel would have 
been better perceived than it has been. 

With this thought, then, of the pre-eminent 
authority of the Master's teaching, we get us back 
to those parables of which we are speaking, and 
at once come face to face with a presentment of 
Gospel-truth which is sublime. There is no ring 
of failure about it. There is no suggestion of the 
Christ desiring to do more than He will accom- 
plish. He cannot be defeated in his purpose of 
Love and rescue. He is stronger than the 
circumstances of evil. The sheep may stray 
away into separation from God; and be lost 
amid the entanglements of the wilderness; but He 



The Red Gospel 233 

will presently find it. The piece of money may 
roll away from goodness, and lie out of sight in 
the defilement and the dust; but He with the 
lighted candle of His Love will discover it. The 
prodigal son may have sunk into all the degrada- 
tion of beggary and wretchedness; but He will 
bring him to say — " I will arise, and go to my 
Father," and show him the way to that Father's 
waiting arms. What is the true Gospel ? do we 
ask. It is to tell men that all which is, or shall be 
lost, shall be ultimately found. It is summarized 
in those three sayings of Jesus — " I have found my 
sheep which was lost," "I have found the piece 
which I had lost," "My son was lost and is 
found." 

It may be asked — Why did our Lord, in defining 
the character of the true Gospel, make use of these 
three particular illustrations ? May it not have 
been to teach us that souls may come into that 
condition described by the word — "lost," from 
different causes and different contributing circum- 
stances ? 

The sheep became a lost thing from quite a 
different cause from that which caused the money 
to be lost. Again the son became a lost man from 
something essentially different from either that 



234 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

which affected the sheep, or that which affected the 
money. 

And yet all three — the sheep, the coin and the 
man — were lost things. 

Now, a great deal of the misconception which 
exists in regard to the scope of God's Gospel, has 
arisen in connection with this word "lost." 

Theology has used the word as if it denotes 
"irretrievable ruin." "A lost soul" has con- 
sequently been regarded as a soul that never will 
be saved. 

We contend that the word denotes nothing of the 
kind. " A lost soul " describes the condition of one 
in separation from God, and who must face all sorts 
of bitter experiences because of that separation. 
But it does not denote, either in regard to this life 
or any life Beyond, that that lost condition is an un- 
alterable one. If the statements of Jesus be true, no 
lost one can everlastingly remain lost. Christ, in 
describing His mission to mankind, said — " The 
Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which 
was lost" (Luke 19: 10). If the word "lost" 
means " everlastingly ruined," then even Jesus can- 
not save such beings. A person incapable of 
salvation cannot be saved. It is very curious how 
theology has made the significance of the word to 



The Real Gospel 235 

vary according to the locality of a soul. A person 
in alienation from God while living in this world is 
described — and rightly so — as a "lost" one. But 
he, although lost, may be saved, we are told. A 
person in alienation from God in the Spiritual World 
is also described as "lost"; but he, according to 
some, cannot possibly be saved. But why ? we 
ask. Why should one class of lost persons be 
capable of salvation, and another class not ? If it be 
true that the purpose of Christ is "to seek and to 
save that which was lost," how can we, with any 
sense of consistency, exclude the great majority of 
lost ones from that purpose ? And yet this has 
been done to the disparagement of the Gospel; and 
Christ's mission has been explained, not as a seek- 
ing and a saving of "the lost," but of only some, 
and that a comparatively few, of them. 

We have to decide which statements we accept 
— the statements of Jesus, corroborated by Apostles 
and the early Fathers of the Church, or the state- 
ments of later teachers. If the former be right, 
assuredly the latter are wrong. Reconciliation 
between the two sets of statements is impossible. 
The Bible makes God "the Saviour of all men." 
" Orthodoxy " has declared He will save some only. 
Christ has asserted that He came to seek and to save 



236 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

the lost; while the " Gospel" of many is that mil- 
lions never will be saved. 

Well, we tack our faith to the Saviour, and what 
He said on this subject, in spite of all the dogmatics 
of the Schools. We believe Him, when in beauti- 
ful, simple story, He revealed the glorious truth that 
Divine Love must one day be all-conquering. We 
believe that God's omnipotence will vanquish all 
evil; that when this and other aeons, through which 
God is working out His Purpose, shall have run their 
course, and the judgments, disciplinings and prun- 
ings shall be past, the last lost human soul will find 
its home and happiness in the Bosom of the All- 
Father; and that He, the once uplifted Jesus will 
"see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied." 
That, alone, is the Gospel which to us harmonizes 
God's Love and His omnipotence; His Fatherhood 
and Saviourhood. That is the Gospel as taught in 
this fifteenth chapter of St. Luke. 

We stated above that the three illustrations em- 
ployed by our Lord describe three great classes of 
lost souls: — 

(a) He spoke of lost ones who come into that 
condition on account of ignorance and uncontrolled 
instincts and feelings. You know the Master's 
story. A poor, foolish, and inexperienced sheep 



The Real Gospel 237 

looks out upon a world of which it knows little or 
nothing. It appears so attractive and delightful. 
Within the sheep are natural instincts and im- 
pulses. There is a charm in the thought of unre- 
stricted freedom; expectation and delight in the 
prospect of going where it has never been, and of 
doing what it has never done. Outside the shelter- 
ing fold, and away from the shepherd's presence 
lies the wilderness, full of dangers, full of loneliness 
and full of horrors. But it knows nothing of that. 
It is ignorant of the true character of outside en- 
vironment. It will go into that outer world, 
because it has an instinct prompting it to do so; 
and it is ignorant and the instincts have not been 
put under control. You know the sequel. It 
wanders and wanders, and becomes a lost thing. 
It has strayed apart from all that constitutes its 
safety, its real good in life, and happiness. 

There is the spiritual correspondence of this in 
the case of that great class of men and women, 
whom Christ would have called, and we may call, 
"lost souls." They are souls who are detached 
from God. They are in a spiritual wilderness 
where God is not. In the domain of mind and 
spirit, they are without Him. 

Millions of such poor, lost ones are there. They 



238 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

are lost, because of their ignorance and the power 
of undisciplined impulses. They did not realize that 
it is a dreadful thing to live a life apart from God 
and communion with Him. They did not know 
that our natural instincts and feelings, without the 
directing touch of Divine grace, may be the marsh- 
lights alluring us to the bog-lands of degradation 
and wretchedness. They are the victims of inex- 
perience and ignorance. 

(b) Jesus spoke of lost ones who come into that 
condition from another cause. They are lost 
through the lack of power to resist the force of ex- 
ternal influences. You know His story. One of 
ten pieces of money falls to the ground, and is lost. 
Unlike the sheep, it could not be said to have lost 
itself. It was a lost thing, but it was not responsi- 
ble for its condition as it lay on the earth amid the 
dust and defilement. It had dropped from its proper 
place. A power outside itself — the force of gravita- 
tion — had attracted it earthward. There it lay, re- 
sourceless; the victim of circumstances it was pow- 
erless to control; a lost thing. 

Are there not millions of souls in the condition of 
that coin ? — millions who have fallen away from 
God and goodness and lie in the dust and defile- 
ment of evil, because of the irresistible force of 



The Red Gospel 239 

circumstances which have dragged them down- 
ward? 

Go into the slums of our big cities. Look into 
the faces of debased men and "unwomanly women " 
— aye, into the faces of little children, and see writ- 
ten there the inscription — "Lost; lost to God and 
goodness and to all that lifts man above the savage 
and the brute!" Yes, lost! But why? Could 
they help being lost; could they in the face 
of surroundings which dragged them hell- 
ward, be other than they are? Would thou- 
sands of respectable ones who comfort them- 
selves with a Religion which denies to Christ the 
willingness and power of saving in Another World 
those wretched ones so handicapped in this world — 
would they — we ask, in like circumstances, have 
been any better than they ? 

That, then, is another class of lost souls with 
which the Saviour said He would deal. 

(c) Jesus spoke of another class who become lost. 
They are the ones who wilfully and deliberately 
leave God. They know what is right, and elect to 
do what is wrong. These are they who can find 
their way back to God only through bitter expe- 
rience and the trying fire of sobering discipline. 

You remember the parable upon which the 



240 Thoughts of the Spiritual 

preachers have so often preached and missed the 
grandest point of all in it. 

The son of a good father turns his back upon his 
parent, leaves his home and goes forth to his in- 
dulgence, wastefulness and sin. You know the 
history. Not until after a terrible experience of re- 
morse, shame, beggary, hunger, rags, husks and 
swine, did he " come to himself " and get back to 
the forsaken father and home. 

That prodigal was a lost soul. The Christ said 
so — " My son was dead . . . my son was lost." 

There are millions who have wilfully and deliber- 
ately turned themselves away from God. Like the 
prodigal, they, too, must face the spiritual beggary, 
the soul-hunger, the disgrace and remorse. 

Alas! yes; but thank God! the words of the Sa- 
viour lift from all thoughtful minds the hopelessness 
and horror which the old teaching must inspire us 
as we think of lost souls. 

The words He spoke transport our thoughts to a 
future in which, by the eye of faith, we behold a 
redeemed humanity and a "satisfied" Christ. See! 
the God-implanted aspiration of the poet has come 
to pass — 

" I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last— far off— at last, to all." 



The Real Gospel 241 

The "Restitution of all things" is accomplished. 
Men, by the Love of God and the grace of Jesus, 
have risen "on stepping-stones of their dead selves 
to higher things." The words of the Saviour once 
spoken upon earth, are spoken again, as His procla- 
mation of completed work to the World of Spirit. 
"Rejoice with Me; for I have found My sheep 
which was lost." "Rejoice with Me; for I have 
found the piece which I had lost." "My son was 
dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." 

And the old, crude, earth-bound ideas of God and 
His Gospel! Well, 

" Our little systems have their day ; 
They have their day and cease to be : 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 



THE END 




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